Recall Compliance Watch — FDA Food, Drug & Device Recall Tracker

Monitor FDA product recalls across food, drugs, and medical devices in real-time. Get structured enforcement data from the official openFDA API — recall numbers, product descriptions, reasons for recall, severity classifications, and distribution details.

What data can you get?

Food Recalls — Track FDA food enforcement actions including contamination events, undeclared allergens, foreign material, and labeling violations. Each record includes the product description, reason for recall, recalling firm, and distribution scope.

Drug Enforcement — Monitor pharmaceutical recall actions including contaminated medications, incorrect dosages, packaging errors, and cGMP violations.

Device Enforcement — Track medical device recalls from life-sustaining equipment to diagnostic tools. Includes FDA classification (Class I = most serious, Class III = least serious).

Use cases

• Food supply chain teams — Monitor for recalls affecting your ingredients or suppliers before they hit the news
• Pharma compliance — Track drug enforcement actions by competitor or product category
• Hospital procurement — Get alerts on medical device recalls relevant to your equipment inventory
• Insurance underwriters — Assess product liability risk by tracking recall frequency for companies you insure
• Regulatory consultants — Build recall trend reports for clients in FDA-regulated industries
• Journalists — Monitor for breaking food safety stories and track enforcement patterns

How to use

1. Optionally set keywords (e.g., ["salmonella", "listeria"]) to filter by product or reason
2. Set since date to limit to recent recalls (e.g., "2025-01-01")
3. Filter by severity (critical, high, medium, low)
4. Run the actor and get structured recall data as JSON

Example input

{
  "keywords": ["salmonella", "listeria"],
  "since": "2025-01-01",
  "severity": "high",
  "maxResults": 100
}

Example output

{
  "source": "fda-food-enforcement",
  "itemId": "F-0842-2025",
  "itemName": "Organic Peanut Butter, 16oz jars",
  "itemSummary": "Potential Salmonella contamination detected during routine sampling",
  "severity": "critical",
  "score": 9.0,
  "publishedAt": "2025-12-15T00:00:00.000Z",
  "url": "https://api.fda.gov/food/enforcement.json",
  "tags": ["food", "enforcement", "recall"],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-02-14T12:00:00.000Z"
}

Data sources

• openFDA API — Official FDA open data platform covering food, drug, and device enforcement actions
• Data refreshed in real-time with every run

Pricing

Pay-per-event pricing. You only pay for what you use:

• $0.50 per actor start
• $0.003 per recall record

Example: Fetching 200 recent food recalls costs $0.50 + $0.60 = $1.10 total.

Integrations

Works with all Apify integrations: webhooks, API, Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and more. Schedule daily runs to build a continuous recall monitoring pipeline.

Tips

• Schedule daily runs to catch new recalls as they post. FDA publishes enforcement actions on a rolling basis, so a daily cadence ensures you never miss a critical event.
• Use broad keywords, then filter downstream. A query for ["peanut"] will catch peanut butter, peanut oil, and mixed nut products. Post-process in your pipeline for precision.
• Combine with severity filtering to reduce noise. Setting severity to critical or high limits results to Class I and Class II recalls — the ones that matter most for safety.
• Cross-reference with the Food Safety Tracker actor for a complete FDA picture. Recall Compliance Watch covers enforcement actions while Food Safety Tracker focuses on inspection data.
• Export to Google Sheets for non-technical stakeholders. Compliance teams often need a shared spreadsheet they can review in weekly meetings.