Here are some items - a dollhouse, a play mat, an unusual building set, three feeding lines, and a plastic package - we noticed at the 2009 ABC Kids' Expo, the annual baby/kids' product exhibition we attended last week in Las Vegas. We'll be reviewing the feeding items below when they're available, but the other items here won't be reviewed on Z Recommends simply because of their price-to-testability ratio. Events like ABC can allow us the in-person viewing and limited hands-on use necessary to favorably promote some high-priced items we'd otherwise feel obligated to request a sample of before recommending.

Hape's Bamboo Sunshine Dollhouse got our attention with its novelty iPod Touch dock - look, a solar-powered video player so your kids' dolls can be couch potatoes! - but kept it with the bamboo construction and furniture design. This dollhouse has been available in a non-iPod version for almost a year and the solar panel typically powers lights throughout the house. Here's a slideshow that shows off some of this dollhouse's nice lines and thoughtful furniture:



The $500 price tag makes us sad, but in this case, it's hard to argue with.

We loved these shapeshifting, tesselated play mats made of EVA foam. One made of flowers can be used to make a table that can be inset into the mat, and another transforms from an animal-themed play mat into a rocking horse, with bonus chicken and turtle figures for head-scratching variety. Here's a slideshow of some photos we took:



The mats have been garnering blog mentions over the past year, but this show appears to mark their introduction to U.S. markets. Depending on how successful this importer was in getting orders at the show, you may see them showing up at your local brick-and-mortar toy retailer soon - or online - for about $130 a set.

Here's a short video we shot that shows how the pieces work:


We saw several new feeding items we will be reviewing soon. This slideshow shows just a sampling of them.



Items pictured in the slide show above are, in order of appearance:

• Dr. Brown's new sippy cup that is so different from its Big-Gulp-like Training Cup it retains the name only because the former model has been summarily retired. Look for it in the next few months. (The Dr. Brown's rep also told us they had now officially retired their polycarbonate bottles.)


• Kid Basix's new stainless steel bottles, which feature a silicone sleeve and a nice solution to the problem of an opaque feeding bottle: Formula-mixing measurements on the cap.


• A new-to-the-U.S. feeding line from Beaba (maker of the Babycook baby food maker) that includes utensils, plates, bowls, cups, and a feeding set we're especially interested in. We're looking forward to reviewing that stuff as soon as it comes in, for reasons we'll explain when we get a chance to use and evaluate it.


• Environmentally-friendlier packaging: The My Plate-Mate now sports PET bagging (rather than PVC) and minimal cardboard compared to the box-and-window style of most feeding gear. We saw a lot of greened-up packaging at this year's expo, and more companies than we could count making explicit note of it in their product pitches, which means consumer demands are being heard. We like how My Plate-Mate managed to improve their packaging footprint while still offering an eye-catching and attractive design to help sell their product.


• New stainless steel baby bottles from Klean Kanteen, as well as a very long awaited one-piece sippy lid (they've been using Avent lids for years now). Can't wait to try these out - although they won't be available for a few months.

Last but not least, Sprig Toys had several new items we'll be reviewing and talking soon, including this interesting building set that combines cardboard and Sprigwood (recycled plastic and sawdust) for a lean, lightweight building set.


The teasers above are just a fraction of the great products we discovered at the ABC Kids' Expo this year. There are far more we're saving as surprises for readers after we receive samples and test products in our home. If you like the service we're providing, please make sure to subscribe to our blog feed via email or RSS and consider doing some of your Amazon shopping through ZRecs links!

Boon unveiled several new feeding products at the trade show, including baby bottles and a straw cup and a great-looking dish drainer that plays on artificial grass. Here's a close-up demo of the straw cup:


Born Free refused to let us film their prototype, but it's too late for that. Born Free and OXO each have identically-functioning cups that will be coming out around the same time - each of them featuring a twist ring that releases the straw, which is held against the inner rim when it is closed, rather than pinched midway between the center and edge, as the last two popular straw cup design saw similar widespread adoption a few years ago by Thermos, Nurture Pure, etc., and the flip-top (Munchkin, Playtex) did before that. Design comes in waves across this industry.

Here's a bowl I guess we missed - it's available now. Its lozenge shape echoes rounded corners we're seeing in new designs across the market. Such corners give babies and multitasking caregivers more scoopability when trying to get food out of a bowl - a feature pioneered by another company we'll write up soon. Anyway, Boon's bowl:



But Boon also has a bizarre web-like bowl holder in development that sort of turns the stay-put bowl idea on its head. "Wrap" actually encapsulates a bowl of your own in a thermoplastic elastomer webbing that has a suction base and wraps around the bowl lip too. The idea is that it helps keep the bowl affixed to a surface (these things are always great for high chairs, terrible for tables - porous surfaces don't take to suction cups well) but if it fails, the wrap protects the bowl if it is dropped, thrown, etc. We're looking forward to testing this one out when it comes into production.


We saw another clever reworking of the stay-put bowl concept from a new-to-America company that we've been waiting to reach our shores. We'll have a demo of that up soon.

And here's the Grass dish drainer, which is just plain clever. We'll test it too, to see how it works.


Boon also has some new bath stuff, also in prototype stage, that we'll show off soon. One strange item I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet, and one that looks very interesting.

What do Playtex, Gerber, Evenflo, Avent, Dr. Brown's, and The First Years have in common? Today, it's something special. Yesterday all six bottle companies agreed to stop selling polycarbonate (BPA-containing) baby bottles in the U.S.

Go ahead! Pat yourself on the back. Whether you called a company to complain or to check their claims against a Z Report or ZRecs Guide listing that shocked or angered you, or just put your purchasing power into BPA-free products, it's consumer interest in this issue that drove major retailers to ban BPA-containing baby bottles from their stores, and that commercial reality, as well as pending bans on BPA in several states, that have forced the big players' hand.

Philips Avent said the company stopped selling baby products with BPA at the end of 2008; other companies agreed to this deal yesterday. But given the lengthy supply chain these products pass through, they will still be on the market for months to come. Consumers should still check package labeling and trusted sources for information like the ZRecs Guide. Avent's Original Airflex bottles, for example, are still available on Amazon.com, as are their Tempo nursers, which are made of polycarbonate but contain milk or formula in a disposable polyethylene bag.

ZRecs had received hints of this kind of movement from several companies at the ABC Kids' Expo in November 2008, but nothing solid enough to publish.

For a full list of products being discontinued by each company, check out our list on Polliwogged.

From today's Washington Post:

The Food and Drug Administration ignored scientific evidence and used flawed methods when it determined that a chemical widely used in baby bottles and in the lining of cans is not harmful, a scientific advisory panel has found.

In a highly critical report to be released today, the panel of scientists from government and academia said the FDA did not take into consideration scores of studies that have linked bisphenol A (BPA) to prostate cancer, diabetes and other health problems in animals when it completed a draft risk assessment of the chemical last month. The panel said the FDA didn't use enough infant formula samples and didn't adequately account for variations among the samples.

Taking those studies into consideration, the panel concluded, the FDA's margin of safety is "inadequate." [Link]

Here are the key points from the report's summary, verbatim (emphasis mine):

• Bisphenol A is present in food contact applications resulting in dietary exposure of BPA to infants, children and adults. The Subcommittee agrees with the focus of the draft assessment on dietary exposures to children, because they are likely to have both greater exposures and susceptibility than adults as a function of food consumption patterns, metabolism, vulnerability of developing systems and other factors. Nevertheless, it is the opinion of the Subcommittee that the FDA assessment would be strengthened by considering cumulative exposures and differential risk in neonates.


• The draft FDA exposure assessment has important limitations including that it lacks an adequate number of infant formula samples and relies on mean values rather than accounting for the variability in samples.


• The draft FDA report does not articulate reasonable and appropriate scientific support for the criteria applied to select data for use in the assessment. Specifically, the Subcommittee does not agree that the large number of non-GLP studies should be excluded from use in the safety assessment.


• Consistent and credible criteria for study inclusion, recommended by the Subcommittee, would be to use those studies that are judged as “adequate” by CERHR in the FDA hazard, dose-response and safety assessment of BPA. In addition, several studies of effects of BPA on adult humans and animal species that were published after the draft assessment was finished should be considered for inclusion in the final assessment.


• The Subcommittee finds that the assessment lacks an adequate characterization of uncertainties in its estimates of both exposure and effects.


• The weight-of-the-evidence, including studies identified by CERHR as adequate and having utility, provides scientific support for use of a point of departure substantially below (i.e., at least one or more orders of magnitude lower than) the 5 mg/kg bw/day level selected in the draft FDA assessment.


• Coupling together the available qualitative and quantitative information (including application of uncertainty factors) provides a sufficient scientific basis to conclude that the Margins of Safety defined by FDA as “adequate” are, in fact, inadequate.

The American Chemistry Council's Tiffany Harrington is also sounding more agreeable these days: "If the agency determines that existing margins of safety are insufficient in infant applications, our member companies that manufacture BPA will put processes in place to promptly phase out the use of materials containing BPA in baby bottles and infant formula packaging," she told the WP. In other words, if the FDA decides to enforce a partial ban on BPA, the chemical industry will actually comply with that ban, rather than staging a coup and declaring martial law. Good to know!

The Natural Resources Defense Council also commented on this report today, and they're spearheading a campaign to ban BPA from all food contact products, including food packaging. We reported on this effort last week.

Here's the full report. Clicking through to Scribd offers a bigger layout and sharing/embedding options - please pass this around!

Canada moved Saturday to formally ban BPA in infant bottles, after determining earlier this year that BPA should be classified as a toxic substance.

From the Toronto Globe & Mail:

None of the major infant formula makers has figured out a way to cut BPA seepage from their liquid formula cans, according to interviews with company officials, although the industry has begun working with can makers to review new packaging.

“We're looking at alternatives now and keeping [Health Canada] informed at every step of the way,” said Gail Wood, spokeswoman for Evansville, Ind.-based Mead Johnson, which sells several brands of infant formula in Canada. ... Ms. Wood said her company initially estimated that it would take five to seven years to find replacements, but she said “it's not going to be that long.”

Indeed. As the auto industry has so amply demonstrated over the last decade, industry reps are really not useful sources when it comes to discussing the level of hardship that might result from higher standards. We collected data on BPA in infant formula packaging last year, and as the inevitable shift occurs in Canada away from BPA-lined cans over the next few years it will be interesting to see if a company breaks out of the pack and begins distributing alternative cans in the U.S. too. With infant formula, a single brand breaking the silence on the issue could see a major market advantage before competitors were forced to fall in line.

We still see several questions for Canada, including:

• If BPA is banned in bottles, shouldn't it be banned in pacifiers and infant teethers, too?


• If BPA is banned in liquid formula cans, shouldn't it be banned in glass jars of semi-liquid baby food with lids coated with the same BPA-containing epoxy? It's in all of them. And are the BPA-containing lids of cardboard containers really acceptable, or should we go ahead and get those changed, too?


• If the period of primary concern is "up to 18 months," shouldn't this include sippy cups instead of just bottles? And what about exposure levels for pregnant women? Could warnings be an intermediate step for adult items?

We'll see over the next two months just how the ban shapes up, as the government writes the regulations and works towards finalizing them. The most interesting part of this story may then be how much adults should be exposed to BPA. From the Mail:

While Health Canada has concluded the chemical isn't a hazard to adults, that position has been undermined by research issued after the government began its assessment.

A study in the influential Journal of the American Medical Association last month linked bisphenol A to heart disease, diabetes, and liver abnormalities in adults. Earlier this month, a study from the University of Cincinnati found that BPA interferes with chemotherapy used to treat breast cancer, raising the possibility the chemical undermines the efficacy of cancer-fighting drugs.

BPA-free plastic baby bottles are becoming more widely available than ever, with major brands like Playtex working their way towards being BPA-free, Avent coming out with BPA-free, honey-colored PES bottles, and Dr. Brown's with a new polypropylene bottle on the market since last April [thanks, Jenny!]. At the same time, we are seeing new innovations in the area of glass bottles that should make even more new parents turn to them.

Babylife pioneered the glass-bottle silicone sleeve back when the first dedicated BPA-free plastic bottles were just coming on the market, and Silikids one-upped them with a far cheaper model. Both were designed for Evenflo bottles, and we told the folks at Silikids that they should be working on sleeves for other brands of glass bottles. Of course, execution is what makes the difference between a random (and probably obvious) idea and a great product, and Silikids has hit another mark by being the first to come out with a series of skins for 4 and 8 oz bottles, shown above. Here are the glass bottles and brands Silikids says their line of silicone bottle covers are compatible with:

Standard Bottles

• Evenflo


• Dr. Brown's


• Medela


• The straight MoMo Bottle (w/out curve)


• Pigeon

Wideneck Bottles

• Born Free


• Dr. Brown's (launching new glass wideneck bottles soon)


• Pigeon Wide Neck

Meanwhile, Nurture Pure has designed an innovative sleeve for their own bottles that represents a real step forward.



Nurture Pure's new sleeve is not yet on the market, but we got a sample to take a look at after spotting it at the ABC Kids' Expo last month. The sleeve features pockets of air that add additional padding and a pillowy feel to their glass bottles, and will be available for all of their bottle sizes. This is the second of four innovations we mentioned in a recent post about the company.

There are a number of new companies gearing up for distribution of glass baby bottles made of tempered glass, which is harder at thinner wall thicknesses than standard glass. We'll report on those as we get samples in. At least one of these startups, which shall remain nameless, sounded unnerved when we talked with them at the trade show and told them that we subject glass bottles to a drop test.