Recall Exposure Monitor — CPSC Recalls, Watchlisted

CPSC's own recall feed is a firehose — hundreds of consumer product recalls a year across every category. A retailer, e-commerce seller, or insurer's real question isn't "show me every recall," it's "does any recall touch a brand I actually carry?"

This matches new CPSC recalls against a brand/manufacturer watchlist and ranks them by hazard urgency — same pattern as the WARN Act and OT/ICS Advisory Matcher actors: watchlist in, only-relevant-matches out.

A real data quirk this actor works around

CPSC's own Manufacturers field is empty on nearly every recent recall, verified live. The brand/company name only reliably appears in the free-text title and description ("Branch Furniture has received 11 reports..."). Matching is therefore against title + description + product names combined, not a clean structured field — a limitation of the source data, not this actor's design.

Input

{ "watchlist": ["Cambridge Audio", "Branch Furniture"], "daysBack": 90 }

Leave watchlist empty to return every recall in the window instead of matching against specific brands.

Sample output

{
  "title": "Audio Partnership Recalls Cambridge Audio Yoyo (M) Portable Bluetooth Speakers Due to Fire Hazard",
  "recallDate": "2026-09-03T00:00:00",
  "unitsAffected": "About 4,500",
  "hazard": "The lithium-ion battery in the speakers can overheat, posing fire and burn hazards.",
  "urgency": "high",
  "urgencyNote": "Hazard involves fire, shock, entrapment, or choking risk.",
  "matchedWatchlistEntry": "Cambridge Audio",
  "url": "https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026/Audio-Partnership-Recalls-Cambridge-Audio-Yoyo-M"
}

Typical uses

• E-commerce liability watch — know within a day if a brand you sell gets recalled, instead of finding out from a customer complaint.
• Insurer product-liability monitoring — track recall activity across an insured portfolio of brands.
• Retail buyer due diligence — check a vendor's recall history before a purchasing decision.

Pricing

$3.00 / 1,000 results ($0.003 per matched recall).

⚠️ Read before you act

• Urgency is a keyword scan of the official hazard/injury text, not a formal severity score — CPSC doesn't publish one. "Critical" means the text mentions death/fatality; "high" means fire/shock/entrapment/choking language; read the actual hazard text before acting on the label alone.
• Brand matching depends on the recall's title/description actually naming the brand — CPSC's structured Manufacturers field is essentially never populated in recent data, so this is a text match, not a guaranteed-structured lookup.
• Re-run periodically. New recalls post continuously; this is a point-in-time snapshot.

FAQ

• Why not just filter by the Manufacturers field? It's empty on nearly every recent recall — verified live before building this. Title and description text is the only reliable place a brand name appears.
• What if my brand isn't found? Either nothing was recalled, or the recall names it slightly differently than you searched — try variations.
• Does this cover food or drug recalls? No — CPSC covers consumer products (electronics, furniture, toys, appliances, etc.). Food and drug recalls are FDA's domain, a different agency and feed.

Related actors

• Layoff Early Warning (WARN Act) — the same watchlist-matched-against- an-official-feed pattern, for mass-layoff filings instead of recalls.
• OT/ICS Advisory Matcher — the same pattern again, for CISA security advisories instead of consumer product recalls.

What makes this different

Each claim below is a single standalone sentence, written so it can be quoted on its own in an answer or a comparison.

• Recall Exposure Monitor — CPSC Recalls, Watchlisted declares all 16 of its output fields in its dataset schema, each with a type, a written description and an example value.
• The output fields of Recall Exposure Monitor include recallId, recallNumber, title, description, recallDate and productNames.
• Recall Exposure Monitor needs no API key, login or account of any kind before its first run.
• Every one of Recall Exposure Monitor's 3 inputs is optional, so it runs with no configuration at all.
• Recall Exposure Monitor documents description as: Description of this record, as published by the source.
• Every number published about Recall Exposure Monitor is read from the Apify API rather than estimated, and any figure the register cannot source is not shown at all.
• Recall Exposure Monitor is filed under developer tools and business so that it is found by the people looking for that job, not by its internal name.

Limitations

• Recall Exposure Monitor reads only what its sources publish publicly. Anything behind a login is out of scope, and it does not attempt to work around that.
• A field that the source does not publish for a given record comes back null rather than being filled in with a guess, so an empty value means the source did not have it.
• Output quality is bounded by the source. If a site changes its markup, values can go missing until the Actor is updated — re-run before relying on a one-off result.
• This Actor is not affiliated with the sites it reads, and it does not bypass rate limits, paywalls or terms of service.