2026 North America Product Safety Training Workshop

Chemical testing results often raise more questions than answers—especially when companies are responding to emerging chemical issues, evolving regulations, and incomplete supply chain data. This session provides a practical roadmap for working effectively with laboratories when the risks, requirements, and next steps are unclear.
 
Attendees will learn what questions to ask laboratories based on the product and chemical at issue, how to design fit‑for‑purpose testing programs for emerging concerns like PFAS, and how to interpret results in context—including false positives, trace findings, and sampling limitations. The session will also cover how to assess quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) data, determine when a chemical exceedance triggers reporting, warning, or recall obligations, and manage data gaps across complex supply chains.

Finally, the discussion will examine key legal and regulatory trends in California and beyond—and how California’s approach continues to shape national compliance and risk management strategies.

Whether you are building a new program or updating an existing one, it is helpful to have some industry benchmarks. In this session, hear from three experts describe what they have found to be the state of the art in Product Safety Program Management

The products we purchase and use as consumers—and design, manufacture, and stock as companies—no longer originate from a single factory, country, or even region. We operate in a fast‑moving global marketplace where products and components are manufactured and sourced across multiple regions worldwide. With increasingly complex supply chains, how do we ensure that the products we buy, sell, and manufacture are safe?

This session will explore the critical role voluntary standards play in fostering a strong culture of safety within organizations, as well as how to stay informed about evolving and emerging standards development activities. Several long‑established product categories will be highlighted as case examples, illustrating how the absence of standards once contributed to risk—and how newly developed standards are now establishing essential safety baselines to help prevent quality issues from becoming safety issues.

The discussion will also examine how standards are developed and maintained, how they respond to industry needs, their limitations, and the regulatory/legal considerations that arise when no voluntary standard exists.