Our source hierarchy
Every published claim cites a source, and sources are not equal. We rank them, and we show which rank backs each claim on the brand page, so you can weigh a regulation differently from a company's own statement.
- Regulation — the rule or standard itself: EU toy safety legislation, UK regulations, US CPSIA and ASTM standards, ISO. The strongest source available, because it's the thing everyone else is describing.
- Test report — a published report or audit from an accredited laboratory. Specific, dated, and tied to an actual product.
- Certification registry — a searchable third-party database: GOTS, OEKO-TEX, FSC, Demeter. Strong because you can look up the entry yourself and see whether it's current.
- Manufacturer declaration — the brand's own declaration of conformity or spec sheet. Useful and often accurate, but it's the brand describing itself.
- Press — trade or consumer reporting. Context only. Never enough on its own.
What we will not cite
Naming this matters more than the list above, because it's where most product sites quietly fail:
- Marketing copy. A brand's "about" page is not a source. Neither is packaging.
- Affiliate and review sites that earn commission on the products they rank.
- Social media, unless it's a primary source citing itself — a regulator's own account, for instance.
- AI summaries with no traceable attribution.
- Wikipedia, which is a fine place to start reading and not a citation.
Where the recall data comes from
The recalls page mirrors notices from four regulators, each read from that authority's own published feed — no scraping, no intermediary, no API key:
- European Union — Safety Gate, via the Commission's weekly XML reports. The best of the four: alerts carry the Commission's own product categories, plus brand, country of origin and risk type as structured fields, so selecting children's products needs no guesswork from us.
- United States — CPSC, via its public REST service. Names the recalling firm, but only on about a fifth of notices; the rest name an importer or distributor instead.
- Canada — Health Canada, via its Open Government Licence data file. Carries a product category, but names no company anywhere in structured form — so Canadian notices are mirrored unattributed. We'd rather show them with no brand link than parse a company name out of prose and risk pinning a recall on the wrong business.
- United Kingdom — OPSS, via the GOV.UK search index. The weakest of the four: no category and no brand field, so children's products are keyword-matched and the brand is recovered from OPSS's title convention. Where a title doesn't follow it, the notice stays unattributed.
Why some countries are missing
Australia, New Zealand and Japan all publish product recalls. None are mirrored here, and the reasons are worth stating rather than leaving as a silent gap:
-
Australia (ACCC). The recalls site offers an RSS feed, but the
server returns
403 Access Deniedto automated requests. That's a deliberate block, and we don't work around those. - New Zealand and Japan. Both publish recalls on the web, neither through a documented machine-readable feed we could rely on.
- The OECD's GlobalRecalls portal aggregates several countries, but exposes no public API — it's a JavaScript application over a private back end.
In every one of these cases a scraper would work. We're not writing one. A site whose whole argument is "check the primary source" shouldn't be taking data from authorities in ways they haven't sanctioned.
How a recall gets attached to a brand
Only by an exact match on the company name, after normalising case, punctuation and legal suffixes ("Ltd", "Inc", "GmbH"). Nothing fuzzy, nothing based on substrings.
That rule is strict for a reason. The CPSC has published recalls for cloth baby bibs; a looser matcher would attach those to BIBS, the Danish pacifier brand, and publish a recall accusation against a company the notice never named. The cost of the strict rule is that we sometimes miss a real one — the CPSC writes "Stokke LLC" where we list "Stokke Tripp Trapp" — so we keep an explicit list of each brand's legal entity names to bridge that gap, rather than loosening the matching.
Notices we can't confidently attribute are still mirrored; they just don't appear on any brand's page.
What our two labels mean
A brand carries one of two labels, and the distinction between them is the honest part. Collapsing them would make the site look more authoritative and be less true.
The brand says this about itself and we have not checked it against a primary source. We publish it because it's useful to know what a company claims — but it's their statement, not our finding, and the page says so.
Every published claim on this brand cites a primary source that a person opened and read. The brand page lists each claim, its source, and the method used to check it.
What we haven't done yet
Most of this catalogue is not independently verified. The listings began
as research compiled from primary sources, and the depth of checking varies by brand. Where
a claim was checked with AI assistance rather than by a person reading the source, the brand
page says ai-assisted next to that claim rather than implying more.
We would rather show you a weaker label that's accurate than a stronger one that isn't. If a badge on this site ever overstates what we actually did, that's a bug — please tell us.
Why origin is a fact here, not a grade
This site used to lead with American manufacturing, and it doesn't any more. Two reasons, both of them about accuracy rather than politics.
First, "made in" claims are among the least informative things on a label. A country of origin tells you where final assembly happened. It doesn't tell you what the thing is made of, what it was tested against, or whether the factory was audited — which are the questions that actually bear on whether a product is safe and well made.
Second, the regimes genuinely differ, and treating one as the default obscured that. EU toy safety rules require pre-market conformity assessment and restrict a longer list of substances than the US equivalent; the UK largely mirrors the EU post-Brexit; other regions differ again. Those differences are useful to a parent. "Made in the USA" as a badge of honour was not.
So origin is recorded on every brand, as a place name and a regulatory regime, and it's a filter like any other. If you want American-made goods, filter for them — the listings are all still here. They're just no longer the point.
How this site makes money
Some outbound links to retailers are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if
you buy something. Those links are marked rel="sponsored" in the page source, and
we'll always tell you on the page itself.
What commission does not do: affect whether a brand is listed, what label it carries, or where it appears in any ordering. There is no paid placement on this site and no way to buy one. The "Recently checked" band on the homepage is ordered by when we last checked a brand's claims — a date, not a deal.
Most brands in this directory have no affiliate relationship with us at all, and they're listed and labelled exactly the same way as the ones that do.
Corrections and changes
Records change: certifications lapse, formulations change, companies are acquired. When we change a record we say so rather than quietly editing it.
Found something wrong? Send a correction. Tell us which brand and what you believe is wrong, and a source if you have one. We'd rather be corrected than trusted.
This page last updated September 2026.