FDA Recall Monitor: Catch a Recall Before Your Customers Do

Watch FDA food, drug and medical device recalls for any product, ingredient, brand or supplier. You get the firm, what was recalled, why, the severity class, the lot codes and where it was distributed — most serious first, with new recalls and FDA reclassifications flagged on every run after the first.

Built for anyone who has to answer "are we affected?" the same day, and currently finds out from a customer.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A["Product, ingredient<br/>or supplier"] --> B["openFDA enforcement API"]
    B --> C["Food"]
    B --> D["Drugs"]
    B --> E["Devices"]
    C --> F["One row per recall,<br/>Class I first"]
    D --> F
    E --> F
    F --> G{"Since last run?"}
    G -->|not seen| H["new-recall"]
    G -->|FDA regraded it| I["reclassified"]

No scraping and no API key. This reads openFDA, the FDA's own open data API, so it does not break when a page is restyled and it needs no proxy or browser.

Built for

• Food and pharma quality teams answering "are we affected?" on the day
• Retailers and distributors watching every supplier at once
• Compliance and regulatory affairs keeping an auditable record
• Insurers and law firms tracking product liability exposure
• Brand owners who want to hear it before a journalist does

Input

{
  "searchTerms": ["listeria", "undeclared milk"],
  "productTypes": ["food"],
  "maxSeverity": 2,
  "onlyChanged": true
}

Setting	What it does
searchTerms	Product, ingredient or brand — matched against description, reason and firm
firms	Watch specific suppliers or competitors
productTypes	food, drug, device, or all three
lastDays	How far back to search
classifications / statuses / states	Narrow at the source
maxSeverity	1 for Class I only, 2 for Class I and II
onlyChanged	Return nothing on a quiet run
timeBudgetSecs	How long a run may spend paging before returning what it has

Output

{
  "recallNumber": "H-0552-2026",
  "productType": "Food",
  "classification": "Class II",
  "severityRank": 2,
  "status": "Ongoing",
  "recallingFirm": "Uncle Ray's LLC",
  "productDescription": "Lowes Foods sour cream and onion flavored potato chips, 8oz bag, UPC 7 41643 05576 6",
  "reason": "Inaccurate nutritional data including understated sodium content. Undeclared monosodium glutamate.",
  "quantity": "2800 cases",
  "distributionPattern": "NC",
  "codeInfo": "21FEB2026, 28FEB2026",
  "state": "MI",
  "reportDate": "2026-03-18",
  "initiationDate": "2026-02-25",
  "url": "https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety-alerts?search_api_fulltext=H-0552-2026",
  "changeType": "reclassified",
  "previousClassification": "Class III",
  "checkedAt": "2026-09-21T18:44:02.771Z"
}

Rows come back most serious first, so a Class I is at the top of the dataset rather than buried by date.

FDA regrades recalls after the fact. A recall is often reported days before it is classified, and a Class III can become a Class I once FDA finishes its assessment. That comes back as reclassified with the previous grade — a monitor that only reported recalls it had never seen before would miss the single most important update it could give you.

codeInfo carries the lot codes and best-before dates, which is what you actually need to check your own stock against.

Turn it into a supplier alert

{
  "searchTerms": ["your brand"],
  "firms": ["Your Contract Manufacturer Inc"],
  "onlyChanged": true
}

Schedule it daily. The first run records the history without alerting; every run after returns only what is new or has been regraded.

Run it as an API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/arched_friend~fda-recall-monitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "searchTerms": ["salmonella"],
    "productTypes": ["food"],
    "maxSeverity": 1
  }'

Pricing

You pay $0.002 for each recall returned. A run that finds nothing costs nothing.

Watching an ingredient daily	Monthly cost
Checking FDA pages by hand	hours every week
Recall and food-safety alert services	$200 to $2,000 per month
This Actor	under $1 per month for most watch lists

Common questions

A quiet week returns nothing — is it broken? No. openFDA answers a search that matches nothing with an HTTP 404, and that is handled as an empty result rather than an error. No recalls is the good outcome, and the run succeeds and says so in the summary.

Why is severityRank sometimes null? Because FDA has not classified that recall yet. It is null rather than defaulted to the least serious grade, and a severity filter deliberately keeps those rows rather than hiding a recall that may turn out to be a Class I.

Why does the link go to a search page? openFDA publishes no per-recall permalink, so the link runs the recall number through FDA's own recall search rather than pointing at a URL that would 404.

Does it cover cosmetics or tobacco? No. FDA's enforcement API covers food, drugs and devices; those three are what this searches.

Do I need an API key? No. openFDA is open and keyless.

Related products

• Clinical Trial Monitor for the same products before they reach the market
• Regulation Change Monitor for the FDA rules behind the enforcement
• Brand Mention Monitor to catch the press coverage when a recall breaks
• Amazon Price Tracker and Multi-Store Stock Alert to see a recalled line disappear from shelves