2026 International Symposium

Companies operating across the EU and US face a changing product safety landscape shaped by e-commerce growth, cross-border supply chains, enforcement capacity constraints and evolving liability risks. This session will examine how EU and US authorities, businesses and experts can advance a more coherent global baseline for product safety while supporting transatlantic trade. Through practical examples involving online sales, imports, recalls, market surveillance and emerging technologies, speakers will explore where EU and US approaches converge, where they differ, and what each jurisdiction can learn from the other. The discussion will also consider how current and future EU policy developments can strengthen consumer protection while preserving proportionality, legal certainty and opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

This panel session seeks to demonstrate what can be achieved when stakeholders from different backgrounds and with potentially separate goals / aims partner over an extended period of time and look to continue building on earlier successes in those partnerships. Using the Energizer / Reese’s Purpose partnership as a case study, a manufacturer and consumer advocate will not only describe what it is like to create and maintain those relationships but look at how to get other stakeholders involved, whether it is from an industry or regulatory platform and how to keep inspiring continued innovation and evolution of product safety measures without direct regulatory pressure.

Many product safety failures originate not in the product itself, but in the organisational processes behind it: complaints are missed, risks are not properly assessed, products cannot be traced, and corrective actions remain unclear.

As product safety legislation increasingly requires businesses to establish internal product safety procedures, regulators face a growing challenge: how can they make complex regulatory expectations understandable and scalable in fast-moving global and e-commerce markets?

This session explores how the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) translated inspection logic into an anonymous self-inspection approach designed to help businesses reflect on product safety governance throughout the product lifecycle.

Using selected examples from the self-inspection approach, the session will illustrate how product safety can look very different once the focus shifts from products to organisational processes.

Why should access to safe products matter to you? Because the landmark UN Principles for Consumer Product Safety, expressly declare that all persons have the right to safe products, and thus, the entire supply chain is accountable to this imperative, even if in a non-signatory country. Skeptical? A few examples might pique your interest: 1.3 billion people, globally, could be your customers, a population roughly the size of China. Together with their families, they have about $18 Trillion in disposable income. 70% of people with access-limiting circumstances will not return to your business after receiving poor products/service. Over 60% of consumers will switch brands for better accessibility. No matter where you are on the supply chain, you may be overlooking an enormous population, and thus, consumer safety, loyalty, revenue, and compliance. You can't afford to miss this pathbreaking panel with Elliot Kaye, Pinuccia Contino, Tania Vandenberghe, moderated by Belinda May.