UK GCA Supermarket Compliance Monitor

Tracks everything the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) — the UK regulator that polices how the country's largest supermarkets treat their food and drink suppliers — publishes on GOV.UK: investigation findings, compliance/enforcement rulings, the annual supplier survey, guidance on the Groceries Supply Code of Practice, and news.

The GCA is the only body that formally grades supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Co-op, Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Iceland, Ocado, Amazon) on whether they pay suppliers on time, give reasonable notice of delisting, and follow the statutory Code. Its findings feed directly into supplier-relations and food-supply-chain journalism, and into compliance research for anyone selling into UK grocery retail.

What it does

The Actor queries the official GOV.UK Search API (https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json), filtered to the GCA organisation. This is the same public, keyless, documented JSON endpoint that powers the "Latest from Groceries Code Adjudicator" list on GCA's own GOV.UK pages — no scraping, no login, no bot-detection to work around.

For every matching publication it returns the title, description/summary, the GOV.UK content type (news story, publication, transparency data, guidance, corporate report, consultation), the live GOV.UK URL, and the publish date.

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Optional keyword, e.g. a retailer name (Tesco) or topic (investigation, annual survey). Leave empty for everything GCA has published.
dateFrom	string	YYYY-MM-DD. Only items published on/after this date.
dateTo	string	YYYY-MM-DD. Only items published on/before this date.
formats	array	Optional GOV.UK content-format filter (news_story, publication, transparency, guidance, corporate_report, consultation, about, organisation).
watchLabel	string	Tag copied onto every output row, useful when running several saved/scheduled searches.
maxItems	integer	Stops paging once this many rows are collected (default 100, max 2000).

Output (one dataset row per publication)

{
  "watch_label": "GCA watch",
  "status": "ok",
  "title": "GCA publishes findings of Tesco compliance review",
  "description": "The Adjudicator's review found Tesco compliant with the Groceries Supply Code of Practice.",
  "document_type": "Press release",
  "content_format": "news_story",
  "url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/news/...",
  "date_published": "2026-06-12T09:15:00Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-28T00:00:00+00:00",
  "error": null
}

If the request fails or the input is invalid, a single row is pushed with status set to invalid_input, http_error, network_error or parse_error, and the reason in error.

Pay-per-event

Only rows with status: "ok" are charged, on the gca-item-found event. Error/empty-result rows are free.

Suggested use

• Schedule a run every morning with no filters to catch anything new the GCA has published in the last 24 hours (combine with dateFrom set to yesterday).
• Run one watch per retailer name (query: "Aldi", query: "Sainsbury's", …) to build a compliance timeline per supermarket.
• Filter formats: ["transparency"] to pull only the annual supplier survey and levy data releases.

Notes

• Data source: GOV.UK Search API, https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json, a free public JSON API documented at https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/repos/search-api.html. No authentication, no scraping, respects GOV.UK's robots.txt (the endpoint is not under /search/all, the only disallowed search path).
• Results are limited to content tagged to the groceries-code-adjudicator GOV.UK organisation, i.e. GCA's own publications — not general supermarket news.