Red date cakes and sausage-filled corn buns looked unusually bright at the Heshi Peixin kindergarten in north-west China. The colour came from pigment that was never meant to be eaten, and it left almost every child at the school with lead in the blood. More than a year after the scandal broke, a court in Lanzhou has now handed the woman who ran the nursery a life sentence.
Judges in the Gansu capital convicted Li Huifang on Friday under China’s food safety law. On top of the life term, she was stripped of her civil and political rights for good, and assets worth half a million yuan, roughly 74,000 US dollars, will be seized. Her deputy, executive principal Zhu Jinglin, got 15 years behind bars plus a penalty of 300,000 yuan. The four cooks who mixed the colour into the dough on their bosses’ orders face between six and eight years each.
According to the verdict and earlier official reports, the private kindergarten in Tianshui’s Maiji district, open since 2022, had served the tinted snacks roughly once a month from May 2024 onwards, apparently to make its meals look attractive to parents. When tests were done in July 2025, 247 of 251 children showed abnormal blood-lead readings, as did most staff members. Food samples contained around 1,000 milligrams of lead per kilogram or more, against a legal ceiling of 0.5.
The children were treated in hospital or at home, and officials say their lead levels fell by about 40 percent on average after the first course. The affair did not stop at the kitchen door: investigators found that blood test results had been tampered with, and around ten local and provincial officials, including the head of Gansu’s health commission, were investigated.
Beijing has since tightened rules for school canteens, including mandatory checks on each fresh delivery. The ruling came a day after the World Health Organization called lead exposure one of the most overlooked threats to children’s health.
