EU RASFF Food & Feed Safety Alert Monitor

The EU Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) is the official European Commission mechanism for food safety notifications — alerts, information notices and border rejections — updated daily. This Actor connects directly to the RASFF Window backend endpoint (https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/backend/public/notification/search/consolidated/en/), which serves the same structured JSON used by the public RASFF portal. No API key, no registration and no scraping are required: a single POST request returns the full notification list with pagination. The Actor filters results by product category, notifying or origin country, risk decision, notification classification or date range, then delivers clean, normalized JSON records for compliance monitoring and supply-chain risk tracking.

When should an AI agent use this?

• "Show me all RASFF alerts from Sweden in the last 30 days that involve crustaceans."
• "What serious-risk food notifications originated from Iraq this week?"
• "List all published RASFF information notifications for 'other food product / mixed' since September 1."
• "Give me a CSV-ready dataset of EU food safety alerts with serious risk decisions."
• "Compare the number of border-rejection notifications per notifying country for this quarter."
• "Generate a compliance brief: any RASFF alert mentioning peanuts in products from Ecuador."

What this Actor does

• Queries the official EC RASFF backend endpoint with pagination (up to 10,000+ pages / 32,500+ notifications observed in live tests).
• Normalizes each notification into a flat JSON record with consistent field names (reference, validation date, notifying country, origin countries, product category, risk decision, classification, published flag).
• Applies optional client-side filters: free-text search on subject, product category match, notifying or origin country (ISO), risk decision label, notification classification label, and date range on ecValidationDate.
• Respects the observed rate limit (X-Rate-Limit-Remaining: 49 after first call) by using a conservative page size (50 items) and sequential page fetching.
• Charges one PPE event (notificatie-record) per returned notification, plus the standard Apify start fee.
• Includes a built-in safety cap (max 100 pages / ~5,000 raw items) to prevent runaway runs.

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Free text filter on notification subject. Optional.
productCategory	string	Filter by productCategory description, e.g. crustaceans and products thereof. Optional.
notifyingCountry	string	ISO code of notifying country, e.g. SE, EE. Optional.
originCountry	string	ISO code of origin country, e.g. IQ, EC. Optional.
riskDecision	select	Filter by risk decision: serious, not serious, potential risk, not decided. Optional.
notificationClassification	string	Filter by classification description, e.g. alert notification, information notification for attention. Optional.
dateFrom	datepicker	Start date (YYYY-MM-DD) for ecValidationDate. Optional.
dateTo	datepicker	End date (YYYY-MM-DD) for ecValidationDate. Optional.
maxResults	number	Maximum notifications to return. Default 200, max 1000.

Output

{
  "notifId": 873975,
  "reference": "2026.8325",
  "ecValidationDate": "19-09-2026 08:40:55",
  "subject": "Undeclared allergens sesame and peanuts in tahini halva",
  "published": false,
  "notifyingCountry": "Sweden",
  "originCountries": ["Iraq"],
  "productCategory": "other food product / mixed",
  "productType": "food",
  "notificationClassification": "alert notification",
  "riskDecision": "serious"
}

Use cases

• Food importers and retailers: monitor whether products or suppliers from specific countries appear in new RASFF alerts, with serious-risk filtering.
• Compliance and QA teams: build recurring audits (scheduled runs) of notifications in specific product categories, with output exported to CSV or fed into internal dashboards.
• Risk analysts: aggregate notifications by notifying country, risk level or publication status to identify emerging hazard patterns.
• AI agents: answer natural-language questions about EU food safety events using the normalized JSON output, without parsing the official portal manually.

Pricing

This Actor uses Apify's Pay-Per-Event (PPE) pricing model.

• Actor Start: $0.00005 (Apify default, charged once per run)
• Notificatie-record: $0.003 per returned notification (PPE event notificatie-record)
• No charge for filtered results: only notifications that pass the input filters are pushed to the dataset and charged.
• The live RASFF endpoint has no usage fee; cost is purely Apify compute + PPE events.

Legal

• Data source: EU RASFF Window backend endpoint (https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/backend/public/notification/search/consolidated/en/). This is a discovered (not officially documented) internal API used by the public RASFF portal. It requires no authentication and returns public food-safety data.
• Legal basis: Public EU transparency data (low risk per INSTRUCTIE.txt sectie 3). The Actor delivers factual notification records with no advisory interpretation or risk judgment.
• Disclaimer: The Actor mirrors RASFF Window content. The EC's official RASFF portal remains the authoritative source; any discrepancy should be resolved against the EC's published records. The endpoint could change without notice (breaking-change risk noted in scope).
• No personal data: Notifications contain product categories, countries, hazard descriptions and risk classifications. They do not include individual names, addresses or health records.

Related Actors

• Safety Gate Scraper — EU Product Safety Alerts (RAPEX) — related EU transparency source for non-food product safety (RAPEX), same backend-pattern family.

Keywords

EU, RASFF, food safety, feed safety, rapid alert, food recall, alert notification, EU transparency, food compliance, hazard monitoring, border rejection, food import, supply chain risk, compliance audit, EC backend, notification feed, open data, EU regulation, consumer protection.

Changelog

0.1.0

• Initial release: RASFF backend endpoint integration, pagination, client-side filtering (category, country, risk, date), normalized output schema, PPE event notificatie-record, English-language README and Store metadata.
• Concurrentie-check bevestigd: 2 bestaande RASFF-actors op Apify Store (scrapers_lat/eu-rasff-food-alerts-scraper: 2 users, 48 runs; promptica/rasff-food-alerts: 2 users, 67 runs) — laag concurrentieniveau, ruimte voor deze variant.
• Technisch GO bevestigd: live endpoint respondeert consistent (200, JSON, X-Rate-Limit-Remaining aanwezig, 32.597+ notificaties in live test 2026-09-20).