Stanley Cups Won’t Give You Lead Poisoning, But Could the Social Media Frenzy Drive Drinkware Trends Elsewhere?

Brendan Menapace

The Stanley Quencher, known commonly as the Stanley cup, is the hottest thing in drinkware right now. The 40 oz. Tumbler is nothing remarkable to look at: It’s just a run-of-the-mill tumbler that holds a ton of liquid, includes a sealed lid, straw, and tapered bottom to fit in a cupholder, but thanks to social media platforms like TikTok, it is the must-have drinkware accessory.

So, you can imagine how devastated and worried some people might have been when they saw a few social media posts alleging the Stanley cup contains lead.

Social media, just like it can drive hype for various drinkware products, can also simplify news to a headline (“clickbait,” as we call it in the news business), and omit certain facts to paint a picture that’s not untrue, but not the entire truth with all of the context, either.

With that, if you go beyond just seeing a tweet or post about Stanley supposedly being rife with lead and dangerous, you’d see that product safety experts aren’t exactly concerned over any amounts of lead that may be in a Stanley Quencher.

After the initial panic set in, Stanley provided details about where the lead in the product was, and why consumers wouldn’t need to worry:

At Stanley, one of the key features of our products is our vacuum insulation technology, which provides consumers with drinkware that keeps beverages at the ideal temperature. Our manufacturing process currently employs the use of an industry standard pellet to seal the vacuum insulation at the base of our products; the sealing material includes some lead. Once sealed, this area is covered with a durable stainless steel layer, making it inaccessible to consumers. Rest assured that no lead is present on the surface of any Stanley product that comes into contact with the consumer nor the contents of the product. In the rare occurrence the base cap of a product comes off due to ordinary use and exposes this seal, it is eligible for our Lifetime Warranty, available here: https://www.stanley1913.com/pages/contact-warranty.

Stanley assures that its products meet all US regulatory requirements including Prop65. Stanley tests for and validates compliance on all products through FDA accredited 3rd party labs that verify our products follow strict guidelines including but not limited to BPA/BPS, PFOS, and phthalate regulatory requirements.

Within the promotional products industry, too, where both Stanley cups and products modeled after them are popular, suppliers are assuring their customers that their items pose no risk.

“Stanley has passed safety and compliance tests; all compliance documents are accessible on PCNA’s asset portal and our product pages,” PCNA’s global chief merchandising officer Liz Haesler said in a statement to PPM. “Transparency is key to trust, and we ensure that our customers have unimpeded access to all relevant product safety information. We will continue to listen to feedback from the industry and investigate all safety concerns across our assortment of products.”

There are plenty of consumer products that do contain lead, but in a way that is inaccessible to consumers, and therefore pose no risk.

The BBC also interviewed a professor of public health at New York University, who happens to also enjoy using his Stanley tumbler. After testing three cups himself and finding no lead, he even tried to “pry open the cup to test inside, and failed.”

“There appears to be lead, according to the report, but I had trouble detecting it and wasn’t able to detect it using state-of-the-art equipment” the professor, Jack Caravanos, told the BBC.

But, while he said he’s not worried about using his own Stanley cup, he reportedly still said he doesn’t like that companies still use lead to manufacture their products at all, citing California’s Proposition 65, which requires products to include a disclosure if they contain even a trace amount of lead.

So, while Stanley cups are, in the eyes of the law and the accredited professionals, safe, the court of public opinion still holds great power in the real world.

If a few posts about lead contamination was enough to get news outlets like the BBC and reputable universities like NYU involved, it’s likely that some consumers could start the process of finding the next big thing in drinkware.

It was always going to happen, right? Other consumer brands, especially innocuous ones like pens, have gotten their 15 minutes on TikTok, and then the culture moves on.

Stanley’s competitors are even starting to take advantage of their opponent’s momment of weakness. Hydroflask, which itself was once the It Cup company, posted some lead-related messages on social media (without mentioning Stanley, of course. That’s what we call a “Subtweet,” or at least what we used to call it back when it was Twitter).

And while we’d hardly call this a scandal, it does beg the question: Could this be what ends Stanley’s reign over drinkware? We’re not sure that we have the answer here.

For the promotional industry, which adopted the trend of the 40 oz. tumbler to meet customer demand, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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