A Chinese kindergarten boss was sentenced to life in prison after staff deliberately laced children’s meals with toxic lead pigments to make the food look more appealing.
Li Huifang, who operated Heshi Peixin Kindergarten in Tianshui in China’s Gansu province, received a life sentence after 247 youngsters were found with dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. A court also ordered the confiscation of £52,000 of her personal assets, equal to 500,000 yuan, The Sun reported.
Executive principal Zhu Jinglin was jailed for 15 years and fined £31,000, or 300,000 yuan. Four kitchen workers who added the inedible pigments got prison terms ranging from six to eight years. Criminal proceedings against all six defendants were closed.
Blood tests in July 2025 exposed the contamination. More than 20 employees were also exposed to the toxic substances. Investigators traced the poisonings to kitchen staff who had mixed lead-containing pigments into school meals on orders from Li and Zhu.
The motive was not hunger, profit schemes, or some industrial accident. Li and Zhu ordered the four kitchen workers to lace the food so the meals would look more colourful and appealing to the children.
Inedible pigments containing lead went into the meals the pupils ate. Lead is a heavy metal that builds up in the body. It is especially dangerous for young children, whose developing brains and organs absorb it more readily and suffer lasting harm.
The case turned on that deliberate choice. Adults responsible for toddlers and young pupils chose appearance over safety and mixed industrial-style colorants into food.
The court handed down the verdicts just a day after the World Health Organization warned about lead poisoning as a worldwide threat. Bruce Gordon, head of the WHO’s environment department, underlined the scale of the danger.
"Lead poisoning is one of the world’s most serious yet overlooked environmental health threats."
The WHO has urged countries to protect children from lead exposure. The agency notes that children and adults can encounter lead through paint, cookware, cosmetics, and spices, and that industrial contamination remains a major source. The agency says lead affects hundreds of millions of youngsters worldwide.
In Tianshui, the exposure was not ambient pollution or old paint chips. It was pigments stirred into nursery meals by people paid to feed the children.
Once the July 2025 blood tests showed widespread elevated lead levels among pupils and staff, a criminal investigation targeted the kindergarten’s management and kitchen crew. That probe led to the charges, the trial, and the sentences now on the record.
Li, as the operator, took the heaviest penalty: life behind bars and the loss of substantial personal assets. Zhu, the executive principal, received a long fixed term and a heavy fine. The four workers who physically added the pigments each received multi-year prison terms.
The public record available from the case does not name the four kitchen workers, list the exact blood-lead readings, or spell out the precise criminal statutes used. It also does not detail clinical symptoms, medical treatment, or long-term outcomes for the 247 children. What it does establish is the core chain of command, the method, the motive, the exposure numbers, and the final sentences.
Heshi Peixin Kindergarten was supposed to be a safe place for meals and care. Parents in Tianshui sent their children there under that basic expectation. Instead, management ordered kitchen staff to treat lunch like a coloring project and used materials that had no place in food.
Two hundred forty-seven children walked away with dangerously high lead levels in their blood. More than twenty adults who worked there were exposed as well. The court answered with life imprisonment for the boss, a long term for the executive principal, and years behind bars for the workers who carried out the orders.
When adults in charge of children put cosmetic appearance ahead of basic safety, the damage is not abstract. It shows up in blood tests, in a criminal docket, and in sentences measured in decades and a lifetime.
Parents have every right to demand that the people feeding their kids treat that duty as sacred, and courts should keep answering betrayal of that duty with real time.
