Why are Kinder Surprise Eggs Illegal in the USA?

For the uninitiated, Kinder Eggs are a chocolate treat widely available throughout Europe, Mexico and Canada, with the company that makes them, Ferrero (perhaps better known in the U.S. for being the makers of Nutella), selling a whopping 1.5 billion of the eggs per year. Where they don’t sell any is the United States, where the eggs are indeed illegal (though something of a blackmarket does exist for them). So why is a beloved candy the world over explicitly banned in the land of the free? In a nut-or in this case egg-shell, Kinder Eggs are illegal in the states because they break a rule in the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. Regarded as a “watershed in US food policy” the act was drafted to protect the public from unscrupulous, or sometimes just negligent, manufacturers. It was made law on the back of several highly publicised cases of poisoning, most notably the deaths of 107 people (the majority of whom were children) in what became known as the The 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident. It had long been known that the previous laws the FDA were operating under, most notably the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, were woefully inadequate for protecting consumers, but the Elixir Sulfanilamide Incident sparked major public awareness of the issue. So what happened? This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout