In a world where visual appeal of consumer products is critical, it’s important for brands to prioritize product safety and ensure consumers of all ages understand these products are for using NOT consuming! Kristin Cordz, Vice President of Business Development for Market Actives, shares more about her work with Bittrex, focusing on making products taste aversive (bad!!) to prevent the accidental ingestion of harmful substances, including household items like dish tablets, batteries and more. Companies use Bitrex to add an extra layer of safety to their products and to build trust with consumers.
In this episode of The Chemical Show, host Victoria Meyer and Kristin, also known as “The Bitter Gal”, discuss working with major consumer brands to ensure their products are safe and effective. Through their conversation, Victoria and Kristin delve into the importance of transparency in product safety, the challenges faced in the industry, and the need for standardized information to empower consumers in making informed choice
Join us to learn more about the following this week:
- Product safety through Bitrex
- The increasing demand for transparency and safety in products
- Gaining customer insights and meeting the needs of the market
- Working against commoditization to ensure value
- Global safety standards
- Bitrex product tasting
- ACI’s Future Leaders Program
- Standardizing customer understanding
Victoria and Kristin explore the challenges and importance of enhancing product safety and discuss how the manufacturing practices of global companies and the overflow of practices to other regions have led to varying levels of product safety discussion. They further emphasize the impact of transparency trends in consumer awareness and the need for standardized information to assist consumers in making informed decisions. Listen in as they share insights, real-life examples, and strategies to ensure product safety in an evolving consumer landscape.
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Watch Victoria Interview “The Bitter Gal” Kristin Cordz On Youtube:
Listen To Victoria and Kristin’s Conversation Here:
Enhancing Product Safety with the Bitter Gal Kristin Cordz of MarketActives
Hi. I’m Victoria Meyer. Welcome back to The Chemical Show. This week, I am speaking with Kristin Cordz, who is the VP of Business Development for MarketActives, which is the exclusive US distributor of Bittrex Safety Technology. She is actively involved in product safety, regulatory compliance, and managing high value customer relationships. Kristin is a certified product safety professional and as an active participant in various industry organizations, including ACI and the National Poison Prevention Week Council. So we are gonna learn a bit about Bittrex, product safety and some other great things. Kristin, welcome to The Chemical Show.
Thank you for having me, Victoria. I’m very excited to be here.
I am excited to have you here. What’s your origin story? What got you interested in chemicals and product safety and brought you to where you are today?
My background is actually in veterinary medicine, my original plan was vet school and I was working as a CBT, which stands for certified technician, at an emergency and critical care hospital here in Portland, and I was also working on my MBA. When I finished my MBA, I looked around and thought, I’d like a change. Try something different and see what’s out there. So I happened to answer a chemical concepts ad for a part time office manager job, and it turned out that was for Bittrex. I started with the company, 13 years ago as a part time office manager, and we’ve always been kind of a small company, but I’ve been able to create my path and career.
I went full time about 9 years ago now and started as a national accounts manager, and we’ve changed my title over time to the VP of Business Development, just because it more encompasses what I do. But, I actually prefer to use The Bitter Gal, rather than my actual official title just because we work in safety, and it’s hard to have fun with safety. There are 1,000,000 people who are VPs of business development, so it’s not very memorable. But The Bitter Gal is, and so I’ve gone with that personal branding. It just really encompasses the work we do in product safety and making the world better for a good reason.
Well, that’s a great lead in. So tell us a little bit about MarketActives and Bittrex.
And being bitter, bitter in a good way.
Yes. Bitter in a good way. MarketActives is the exclusive US distributor, and we have been for the last 30 years. The company owner, helped build the Bittrex business here in the US, by starting to put it into products and really getting that safety built up with the various consumer products that we go into. Bittrex itself, was discovered in the late-50s, by a company called McFarland Smith. So they are a 200+ year old pharmaceutical company that was trying to make a better anesthetic. And one of the variations that came out had no anesthetic properties.
It just tasted really, really, really bad. I always call it the Post-It invention. It’s like that “Oops What are we gonna do with this?” The scientists at the time, they thought, well, we could use this for alcohol denaturing because it was safer than the other options at the time. The 1st commercial use was actually on a Danish pig farm to keep the pigs from chewing on each other. Then in the early-80s, it became used primarily as a safety ingredient. So added into consumer products to help stop kids from eating and drinking things they shouldn’t, and that’s our primary function today.
So Bittrex is bitter. It’s a bitter flavor additive for stuff.
It is actually recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most bitter substance.
That’s interesting. Bittrex is clearly centered around product safety. I know that it goes into a lot of different products, where would we find Bittrex and why?
So, Bittrex goes into so many different products. Anything from laundry detergent, nail polish remover, antifreeze, coin cell batteries, no-chew sprays for animals, all sorts of different things. Things like nail polish remover because it’s pretty colors. There’s a number of products like diffusers in your house, those liquids are scented, and they smell good. Sometimes they smell like food. So anything that may look or smell like food, or attractive colors like the bright pinks and greens, Even antifreeze, we know ethylene glycol itself as a chemical is sweet by nature, and it’s that pretty bright green color. Kids, if they don’t know better or they happen to see it in a container that’s not its original packaging, Bittrex is really in there to be that last line of defense. So when it is in use or the packaging is open and you don’t have all those other protections, you have something that if the child gets it in their mouth, they will spit it back out.
Okay. So it is really about not eating the pretty stuff that you’re not supposed to be eating.
Basically. It’s a natural instinct for humans that bitter is bad. You go out in nature and you pick a berry, you put it in your mouth, and it has that really bitter taste, you automatically spit it out. This works on that exact same instinct.
That’s really cool. So obviously, the Bittrex story is really centered around product safety, I know that’s a passion area for you. Why is product safety so important?
Well, product safety is important because everyone deserves to have safe products in their home. Companies don’t intentionally make products that are harmful, but there are always hazards and risks associated with things that you can’t always design out of a product. Products are designed with risk assessments and formulations to make them as safe as possible, but you can only go so far and still have that product do what it is intended to do. So that’s really where Bittrex comes in, and it helps add an additional layer of safety on top of all those other layers. That then works together to then provide the consumer with the safest product possible.
Got it, that makes sense. I know you guys have a saying about Bittrex and people. Do you wanna share that saying with us?
Yes. “Bittrex making sure bitter tastes stupid.” That’s one of our newer ones, but, the main tagline that we like to use is “Bittrex protecting children, family, and brands.” Since we really cover all 3 of those.
You’re really in a very consumer centric business. How people use products safely and unsafely. The benefits and the impacts are ultimately felt by the individuals, but obviously, working with many of the major consumer brands to help make their products effective. And yet, Bittrex surprisingly is not really a household name. I have a couple questions on this, one is just where do you gain these consumer insights? Because you’re obviously working to create a solution to a problem that maybe nobody ever anticipated. The consumer products companies wouldn’t necessarily anticipate, let’s take Tide Pods for example, who would have ever thought consuming a Tide Pod would be a good idea? Yet there was this whole phenomena for a few years where people thought it was funny. How do you start figuring out what your applications are and what the consumer products companies really need?
That’s actually one of the reasons why we stay so engaged with the trade associations like ACI. We’re also members of ICVISO, the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization, which is an organization that basically gathers product safety professionals to elevate product safety, share best practices, and really look at how we can help make products safer.
The tagline of “making sure stupid tastes bitter” actually came out of the Tide Pod Challenge. Through the ASTM standards process, there is actually a Bittrex included in that film. If you watch those challenges of people trying the Tide Pods, which I have, many of them. You can actually watch them put it in their mouth, and start to make that bitter face because they taste the Bittrex in the film. But they want their 15 minutes of social media fame, and they bite it anyway. So it comes down to, how do you prevent against intentional ingestion versus accidental ingestion. That’s something that I feel almost any product safety, person or company, that we always come up against and have frequent discussions on because it’s really hard to stop or prevent intentional behavior. But we try and do everything we can to prevent the unintentional and the accidents. So anything that’s that accidental ingestion because a child doesn’t know better, or somebody accidentally left something in the wrong container or whatever it is.
So a lot of our insights come from both, paying attention to what the NGOs are talking about and consumers. We do a lot of listening to what’s being talked about, as well as then what we hear from the trade associations and all of those kind of things.
Yeah. It’s interesting you talk about the accidental ingestion because obviously, that’s where the work is really done. It’s hard to prevent when somebody’s willingly doing something that they know they shouldn’t do. That makes no logical sense, but I know ACI and that you guys are quite active in really talking about proper safety. Like keeping products in their packaging. I know there’s this whole Instagram and Pinterest trend to make your laundry room look really pretty and load everything into pretty containers.
But as we know, kids especially, they don’t discern safety. If it’s there in front of them, oh, that looks like candy. Oh, it’s not candy.
Right, and things like safe storage, those are always challenges, and that is definitely a trend that we would all like to see go away. One of the things that trend exemplifies is the fact that people assume a certain level of safety in their products, which is there, but at the same time they don’t realize that some of those layers of the safety, come in the packaging that those products come in. Things like the packaging and the child resistant closures and all of those other pieces of products, maybe they are not as aesthetically beautiful as home organizers would like them to be, but they serve a function. It’s that disconnect in realizing that there is a function beyond, this is how I buy it on the shelf, and this is how the company that made it shipped it to me. But that it actually does a job.
We could talk a lot about that, but we’re gonna we’re gonna park that one. Bittrex is again, as we’ve talked about, a product that many people don’t know. It is a small but critical part of the final product. I think what’s interesting is, commoditization and replication are always a risk. Especially when products that have been on the market for decades such as Bittrex, but their products that are not easily recognizable. The function is there, but the recognition of the function is not there from a consumer perspective.
How do you guys work against commoditization, and really ensure that you’re getting the value for the work that you’ve done, so that Bittrex is really seen as a premium additive to these many consumer products.
That’s a great question. To start with your first point, about consumers not really knowing the Bittrex name, I kind of relate it to my work from emergency medicine. One of the things that we would say is, The ER is there when something goes wrong, and you’re really glad that we’re there to help in the situation, but you’d rather not need us. In some ways, I think Bittrex is very similar, we are that last line of defense. We work with companies so that they really build the safety into the DNA of their product. In that, with the messaging and all the other pieces, it hopefully never gets to the point that a child is putting it in their mouth and needing to then have the Bittrex work for them to spit it out. It is there if it’s needed. So there are companies that use the Bittrex logo on their products and talk about it in our marketing resources and really communicate that added layer of safety to their consumers, but safety is always one of those topics that is a little challenging to talk about sometimes. People shy away from it a bit just because people don’t want to think about what could go wrong.
When you talk about safety or think about the safety of a product, you do have to take that moment and think about what could go wrong. As you said a little while ago, with the consumer brands maybe not recognizing what a consumer might do, we really need to look at those pieces. As we’re looking at new products coming into the market or potential new products or changes in the categories, particularly with sustainability things that are coming in and formulas that are getting concentrated. We’re taking the water out of products. That’s gonna change that hazard profile of the product that the customer interacts with. So we need to think about the safety of that product in a different way that maybe wasn’t necessary when it was, a larger bottle with lots of water and things like that. That’s really that piece we want to be there. Recognition by the consumers is fantastic because then they’re looking for safety. They’re aware of it. But, especially in today’s world, people have so many things to think about that it’s just 1 more piece that just isn’t prioritized on the plate of things they wanna think about.
So a lot of times, yes, we are a brand that benefits people and consumers. At the end, we really work with the brand manufacturers to help them build it into their products, put the safest product they can on the market, and then help them with their messaging. If there is a consumer that’s a little more engaged, and wants to really dig deeper into, what is really in their product. The transparency trends that are happening today, are just making a lot more consumers aware and interested in that understanding piece. They can get to a place where they’re like, “Oh, there is this added safety feature, and that’s going to influence the products I choose to buy, knowing that’s there because then I know I’m making the best choice I can for my family.”
You’re obviously US based, but Bittrex is sold globally. So I think about products that are meant to be sold and manufactured, let’s just say in North America or in Europe, we have expectations around the safety profiles of them because of EPA, FDA, pick your acronym, all these these groups that put some rules and regulations around it. Is there a concern that you’ve seen around products coming in from other parts of the world that people then start using that maybe don’t have the same safety standards, or do you feel like we’re getting to a place where there’s kinda parity on a lot of this?
I feel there is a lot of parity that one sees. There’s a lot that, as you noted, happens in the US and the EU, but because a lot of companies are also global companies and they’re manufacturing globally, I’ve noticed that a lot of companies will manufacture the same formulation type of product, with the same features in other places. There are certain regions where even just the idea of product safety, and the discussion of product safety doesn’t happen on the same level. That just hasn’t been something that’s a forefront topic, but I think there’s a lot of overflow of what happens, particularly in Europe and in the US, that then expands into the other countries and is adopted because everybody wants to make sure that their citizens and their people are as safe as possible. Bittrex is that global brand, Bittrex works with a distributor model. So, there is a home-office based in Edinburgh, Scotland, They have a number of exclusive distributors like us, around the world. One of the benefits that we bring in through the Bittrex process, is our Bittrex certification testing. Where we help companies actually figure out what the minimally aversive level is in their product, which is a very long way of saying we help them figure out the lowest possible level that is still effective to make their product taste bad and get a child to spit it out.
I would imagine, or maybe you tell me, there’s a certain amount of formulation work that needs to happen to ensure that the Bitrix as it gets added in is not changing the effectiveness of the formula. That the product works the way that people intended it to.
Yeah, that’s one of the things we’re always looking at with the certification process. One, we’re helping companies add it into their product, making sure they’re using the right preparation and have the right PPM level. Bitrix is used in parts per million, because it being the world’s most bitter substance, it has very, very low levels that are effective to have that aversive effect. So we do the taste testing on the least sensitive population, which is adult males, so that it’s effective on children, who are the most sensitive population. If it’s moderately intolerable or worse to an adult, it’s going to be absolutely intolerable to a child you want to be spitting out the product.
We’re looking at those pieces, but then how do they fit it in their product? We wanna make sure that we give them a final number, but then we want to look at how it is in use. If it’s a liquid that then goes into a different type of packaging, then we wanna look at how the consumer is going to interact with it, and is it still effective after it’s gone through manufacturing or all of those pieces.
So the formulations are tested with humans, is that what happens?
It is. Bittrex works with a independent sensory lab, that is also in Edinburgh. Samples get sent to the home office lab. They get anonymized and then sent to the testing facility. So there’s a toxicology review that happens to make sure that the samples are safe to be tested with humans. The reason that we do the human taste testing is because a machine reading can’t tell you the effectiveness of the aversive level. It can just tell you what the level is.
Every formulation is a little bit different, and the chemicals that make up that formula are going to have different impacts on the perception of the bitterness. Particularly things that have fragrance in them, different fragrance types and different fragrance loads can affect the perception of the bitterness. When you have a fragrance product, we actually test every single variation to make sure that it still works in each one.
Can we nominate people for the bitter taste testing, perhaps like as a punishment? Like, you get a trip to Edinburgh and you have to taste test bitter things?
No.
Okay. Well, good try.
Mainly because there’s people that actually are trained to do this. They’re trained in what these different tolerability levels mean, and I’m not sure that many people wanna sign up for that, but we appreciate those that do because it’s so vital for what we do. Just that value added for what the Bittrex certification brings to a product. We do have a way for people to try the Bittrex. When you tell someone this is the world’s most bitter substance, there’s a lot of people who either have no idea what that might mean or they think more like lemon, but lemon’s more sour. Whereas this is bitter. It’s a nuance difference, but, with lemon you get that classic lemon base, and then Bittrex you actually spit out.
So we actually have taste test kits. They’re basically paper strips that have Bittrex on one end of them, and it’s a chance for people to taste the Bittrex, get an understanding of what it’s doing in your product, and then have that memorable, visceral experience. You have that opportunity to say, I get why this works and why making our product bitter would make someone spit this out and how that adds the safety to our product. So that’s something we provide to people who request them through the Bittrex website or to new customers we’re working with. We have a lot of customers who are adding it in their products that then use it in their sales meetings when they’re going into a new retailer. They actually include that as part of their messaging to show that this is that added feature we have in here, and this is what it tastes like, and this is why it’s there.
That’s cool. And that makes sense because otherwise, it’s just conceptual and we don’t really understand it. So you’re gonna send me some of these test strips. Maybe I’ll do it either live or I’ll do an outtake, for when we publish this. I may regret that by the way. But I’d love to be the guinea pig testing this bitter Bittrex.
Oh, I will happily send you a taste test kit. Absolutely. It’s a lot of fun. We’ve gone to trade shows, and there was one we went to, and there was a guy who stopped by the booth. He’s like, I did that 20 years ago. I’m not doing that again.
And it’s hilarious.
Do you have to wash it down with water? You know how when you eat hot peppers and your mouth is hot and burning, and you’re trying to figure out, now what am I gonna do? I’m gonna eat something? Am I gonna drink milk? I gotta do something. Is there a counter to the bitter Bittrex taste?
The antidote is chocolate.
Oh, that’s beautiful. Are you serious?
I am serious. The antidote to the Bittrex is chocolate, and milk chocolate works best, but I usually recommend people eat a couple pieces because it’ll help coat the taste buds, and then it’ll help neutralize the Bittrex.
Alright. So Bittrex and chocolate.
You get to bribe people to try the bad stuff to eat the chocolate.
Nice. So you’ve been really active with ACI and part of their Future Leaders program, which played a really key role in the What Cleaning Ingredients Do ingredient communication tool that rolled out about a year ago. So can you talk about just what prompted the development of that tool?
I’ve been honored to be part of the Future Leaders group at ACI since its inception in 2019. We wanted to have more than just a leadership development program, we wanted to have a relevant impact on the cleaning products industry, where it’s going, and really how could we help shape and impact where the cleaning products industry is going. So we started looking for that niche that wasn’t being filled by another group, and where could we have that impact? It was really in ingredient transparency. That was the year before SB 258, which is California’s Right To Know Act, was going to go into effect starting in January of 2020. We really wanted to look at how we could help companies understand how consumers were going to perceive this change, because all of a sudden, labels are gonna start to look different. There’s gonna be more disclosures of information and when labels change, it becomes noticeable. Like, “Oh my goodness. What is this?” So we really wanted to look at how consumers would be effected and then take that learning back to the industry.
We actually started with design thinking, and designed a project that did empathy interviews and consumer insights with actual consumers on their perceptions of the labels and their priorities of ingredient transparency. What are the most important things on the label, how do they feel about ingredients in general? Do they understand when things are listed, and just what do they wanna know? One of the things that they told us was that they felt trusted and cared for more by the brands when they were sharing this additional level of transparency and telling them what was in the product. They actually felt that the brands were showing a greater level of care for them and that it was increasing their trust in those brands. So we wanted to see how we could really impact how consumers interacted with the new information, because one of the other things they told us was, the chemical names are great, but they don’t really understand what those chemical names are because those are sometimes, multi-word names, and you read that and are sometimes confused.
Jumping in here, even people in the chemical industry don’t recognize and know all those names, or people in consumer products companies doing formulations may or may not know all those names. You know the ones that you interact with on a daily basis. You maybe know the ones that your company sells or that your company uses, but there’s thousands of products that you’re just not aware of. You just trust the formulations, and that it’s the right product in the right place. So this whole aspect of being able to interpret what the product is, it’s hard.
Right. So what we wanted to look at was, how could we have an additional piece that really helps, standardize consumer understanding. Looking at function language, part of California’s SB 258 was looking at the functions of products. There’s great tools like SmartLabel, where companies can put those things out there. So one of the things we did was, we actually did a scrub of smart label and looked at the different descriptions for the various ingredients that were included in that, which is what a consumer would see. The example that we use the most, is actually water. There were 14 different definitions for the function of water in a product.
Wow!
We had that exact same response. That could be a little confusing. Some were as short as a couple words and one was 3 sentences long. There’s just so much in between that it’s hard as a consumer to then go, “Okay, how do I interact with this? How do I even know what this does in the product?” People are not going to go to school to become formulation chemists to know all the ins and outs of that. That’s just not necessary.
What we basically wanted to do was standardize the language in a way that was consumer friendly and accessible to really give them that knowledge they needed to feel empowered with this extra closure on their label. They can then say “Well, there’s that chemical, but that chemical is a surfactant.” Then having a standardized definition of what is a surfactant, or what is a defoamer, or all the different pieces that are part of the formulation. Using consumer research, with both quantitative and qualitative research, empathy interviews, we got a list of chemicals, and we had a technical team with member companies of ACI volunteering their technical people to clean up the list. Looking at things like, these are basically the same and they have this function, and this one has this function. Really getting the technical function down to a level of maybe not nuance where, this chemical structure does this versus this chemical structure does that. That’s a nuance that a formulator needs. That’s not a nuance that a consumer needs.
We try to aim for being generally consumer understandable. There’s reports of sometimes that’s 3rd grade, sometimes that’s 8th grade, or somewhere in between. But, one of the things we did with that was, we got down to a list of 42. So there are 42 consumer functions, and those are the 42 groups of the functions that are in cleaning products.
Then we created the definition to explain what that function does.
Got it.
After we verified with the technical people that, yes, this consumer friendly language is still technically accurate. We then went to consumers, and we had them rank it both on, do you feel the definition matches this term? So we gave them the term and the definition, and say, do you feel this is a match? Then we also asked them how helpful it was. So was that definition helpful to their understanding? The majority of them came back as being good matches, and those that didn’t, we tweaked a little bit and retested. We actually consumer tested all 42 of them, and finally all of them came back as being helpful even on the ones that consumers maybe didn’t feel were a really good match.
Those were also sometimes those more obscure chemicals or functions that people didn’t necessarily know. For example denaturant, is not a common thing that people think about. Maybe they learned a little bit more about it in the pandemic with denaturing alcohol and all that for hand sanitizer, but still not a common term that people use every day. But they still found the definition of that word to be helpful.
Then it got turned into a web based tool. Is that right?
Yeah. We turned it into a web based tool, and we launched that with member companies. We also have been able to integrate it into the SmartLabel integration portal. That’s the back end of SmartLabel. So that’s not the side the consumer see. That’s the side that the company is putting in the information.
What we’re working on, and we’ve gotten commitments from member companies within ACI, is to start incorporating this language and when they’re putting in the function language into SmartLabel or using it on their website disclosures or anywhere that they’re talking about ingredients to really use this standardized language. So that when a consumer picks up product A and product B, and they’re trying to look at the differences, if one says it has a surfactant and the other one says a surfactant, they both describe it as the same way.
It has both a demystifying and standardizing effect.
Yeah. Consumers, NGOs and regulators, everyone keeps saying, “Well, we don’t have enough information. We need more information.” But at a certain point, more information is just more information.
Yeah. We’re living in a world of information overload. We don’t need more information. We need the right information.
Well, the right information and even the right information presented in a way that is understandable. It’s really that consumer understanding piece that we were really focusing on because we wanted consumers to have that empowerment of, “Okay, I know what this does in my product” or if they don’t remember what that is. They look it up.
To have that standardization across the industry so that people can make those comparisons or just have that understanding, Similar to what you see in food products. Every food product has the exact same nutrition label. Everything else may be different, but the way the nutrition information and the ingredient information is presented is identical. So we were looking at something like that, and thinking how can we just create this one space of standardization to help consumers use the information. Not just say, I need more information.
Right. It obviously ties back very well into the rest of the work that you’re doing from a product safety advocacy perspective. So on that note, we’re gonna wrap this up. Tell us what’s next for you and for MarketActives and for Bittrex? What should we be looking forward to over the coming 6 to 12 months?
Bittrex is always looking for what is that next new big project, and we don’t fully know at this exact moment what that’s gonna be, because product development is changing all the time. While we do try and create an awareness for companies to build us in at the start, sometimes we get added when something happens or when someone’s like, “Oh, This might be a problem.” When they do risk assessment.
Absolutely.
The biggest area that I think we’re gonna be playing more in and doing more work in, is related to products changing their format for sustainability. I think there’s gonna be a lot of overlap with relooking at the safety profiles of products and how do we help with that.
I think your point with sustainability and new green products, obviously formulas are gonna change. So having Bittrex ready for the next change is important.
This has been a great conversation. I have really enjoyed learning more about you, Kristen and Bittrex, and thank you for joining us today on The Chemical Show.
Well, this was so much fun, and I am so glad you invited me, I can’t wait for everything that comes next.
Awesome. Thanks everyone for reading today. Keep reading, keep following, keep sharing, and we’ll talk to you again soon.
About Kristin Cordz:
Kristin is currently the VP of Business Development for Market Actives, the exclusive US distributor of Bitrex® Safety Technology, providing comprehensive support to all US customers. Her responsibilities include the development of core Bitrex brand assets, product safety ingredient branding, regulatory compliance, and managing high-value client relationships. With 13 years of experience, she is considered a leading authority of this product in the United States.
Kristin holds the designation of Certified Product Safety Professional (CPSP). And is an active participant in various industry organizations: ASTM, ICPHSO, SPSP, ACI, and the National Poison Prevention Week Council.