June 4, 2012, Arlington, VA – CeliAct,
makers of nutritional supplements for people with celiac disease,
conducted tests on the new Domino’s gluten-free pizza to see if it
contained gluten.
June 4, 2012, Arlington, VA – CeliAct,
makers of nutritional supplements for people with celiac disease,
conducted tests on the new Domino’s gluten-free pizza to see if it
contained gluten. Using their state of the art lab with strict gluten
thresholds, they tested pizzas from three major cities. Two of the
pizzas had no detectable gluten, while a third had trace levels
considered safe by almost all standards.
The test was done in response to the heated controversy surrounding
Domino’s new gluten-free pizza. Many in the gluten-free community were
upset that Domino’s issued a warning that the pizzas were not intended
for people with celiac disease, the most severe form of gluten
intolerance. “There was a huge debate about whether Domino’s gluten-free
pizzas contained gluten or not,” says Max Librach, Co-Founder of
CeliAct. “So we decided to use our lab to see for ourselves.”
The pizzas from Domino’s in Boston and New Orleans came back
undetectable for gluten (with a detection threshold of three parts per
million). The pizza from Washington, DC, contained seven parts per million of
gluten. To put that into perspective, the widely respected Gluten-Free
Certification Organization uses a threshold of 10 parts per million to
determine if a food is gluten-free. National celiac experts and support
groups have urged the FDA to use a threshold of 20 parts per million in
their gluten-free labelling laws.
“This does not mean that we endorse Domino’s gluten-free pizza for
people with celiac,” says Zach Rachins, another co-founder of CeliAct.
“Instead, we just wanted to know if the gluten-free community should be
any more critical of Domino’s than it is of other national chains with
gluten-free offerings like Outback Steakhouse, P.F. Chang’s, or Legal
Seafood. Other restaurants that have gluten-free menus don’t have
dedicated gluten-free kitchens. We thought the backlash might have just
been in response to how Domino’s communicated their warning to celiacs.”
For a full description of how the experiment was carried out, see the full post on the CeliAct Blog.
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