Change country
Brio
Products

Products

Store locator

Customer service

Our thinking

How we work

Our Company

About BRIO World
Store locator
Customer service
Our thinking
How we work
Our Company

Safe toys – our top priority!

We test over and over again

“The basics of our toys are fundamentally the same as they were when I started in the 1970s, but today we have a much longer list of toys and supplements to our basic toy models. The biggest difference between then and now is that now we conduct more than 1,000 tests a year where we check for chemicals and quality to ensure that BRIO toys are safe for use by children. This is due to the stricter legal requirements.” says Göran Kullberg. 

“When the first standard came in 1975 it consisted of 4 sides. Today we have directives and standards with thousands of sides of legal text to comply with. Testing equipment has improved beyond imagination and today we can detect substances in quantities so small that you can start a discussion whether they even exist at all,”

As Head of Quality, Göran is responsible not only for ensuring that all toys comply with all legislation and regulations established by authorities in the more than 20 countries in which BRIO is present. He is also responsible for implementing fundamental changes in the materials that BRIO uses in its products if this can further improve quality and safety.

We always try to improve

“In 2012 we decided to change the surface treatment of all metal parts that we use in our train models to ensure that they will be as free of nickel release as possible. This meant that we managed to lower nickel release by more than 96%,” says Göran. He adds: “This process took more than two years as we had around 1500 different metal parts.”

BRIO also managed to lower the migration of organotins from 1/100 to 1/1000 of the limits established by the authorities.

“It might sound like a waste of time for us to lower a value that is already much lower than the regulatory limits, but we think it makes sense to do whatever we can to lower chemical content in toys. It’s a continuous process,” Göran explains. “At the moment we are working on a thorough analysis of the different lacquer types we use. People often think water-based lacquer is the best and most safe to use, but that’s not necessarily true. Water as well as solvents are merely carriers of the paint and will disappear when the paint dries. The main risk is still in the different pigments used.

We also have to consider durability and quality. That’s why we test rigorously so our decisions are always fact-based,” Göran adds.

Göran Kullberg has been Global Head of CSR and Quality at BRIO since 2006, but his tenure with BRIO goes all the way back to 1978 where he first started working with the production of wooden parts. From the middle of 1980s he has been responsible for running the BRIO factory. In this period of time BRIO has increased its size and the production methods have undergone a tremendous development. Göran has recently represented the toy industry in a European expert group under the European Union on “Product Traceability”.

Change country

BRIO uses so-called cookies on its websites in order to display the websites. We use cookies
from service providers to make the websites work well and be comfortable to use and
- to compile anonymous statistics on the use of our websites,
- to improve the websites and to show you as relevant information as possible - both on BRIO's websites and on websites run by third parties.
You decide which cookies you want to allow. However, some features of the websites may not be available if you do not allow cookies. You will find more information in our privacy policy 

Edit cookie options Save all and continue
Save all and continue Edit cookie options

Edit cookie options

We use different types of cookies to be able to offer you the best experience of the website as possible. In the following text you can read more about our cookie categories and what settings you can make:

Technically necessary cookies

These cookies are always needed for the website to be displayed, to be technically secured and to be able to provide certain other basic functions on the website.

Statistics

These cookies enable BRIO to compile statistics on visits and use of our website. With the help of these statistics, we can, for example, examine the number of visitors and which content is most popular and use this knowledge to improve our range and our websites. All these statistics and related information are anonymous. 

Marketing

These cookies enable us, based on your interests, to show you personally selected and particularly relevant content, including advertising. In order to personalize such content for you, we can evaluate your use of BRIO's websites for the above mentioned companies and determine and show you relevant content. To this end, we collaborate in part with external partners that allow us to display personalized advertising on other websites as well. To do this, we transfer the required information regarding how you have used our offers to our partners. You can read more about this in our data privacy policy. 

Save all and continue Save selected and continue