EFSA Scraper

Collect news, scientific opinions, and publications from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The scraper crawls listing pages and extracts structured data from each article — title, date, category, description, tags, and images.

Getting started

The simplest way to use it: set searchQuery to a topic you care about (e.g. "pesticides" or "salmonella") and the scraper will search EFSA and return matching articles. Without a search query, it defaults to scraping the latest news from efsa.europa.eu/en/news.

You can also pass specific EFSA listing page URLs as startUrls if you want to target a particular section, like scientific outputs or supporting publications.

Input

Field	Type	Description
searchQuery	String	Topic or keyword. Examples: "aflatoxins", "novel food", "food additives"
startUrls	Array	Specific EFSA listing pages. Examples: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news, https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/scientific-output
maxResults	Integer	Default: 100
proxyConfiguration	Object	Optional.

Output example

{
    "title": "EFSA assesses safety of high-dose biotin as novel food",
    "date": "2026-02-28T09:30:00.000Z",
    "category": "Novel foods",
    "type": "Scientific Opinion",
    "description": "EFSA has assessed the safety of high-dose biotin (vitamin B8) intended for use as a novel food ingredient...",
    "imageUrl": "https://www.efsa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2026-02/biotin-assessment.jpg",
    "tags": ["novel food", "biotin", "food supplements", "vitamins"],
    "url": "https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/scientific-output/2026/biotin-novel-food",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-03-16T08:00:00.000Z"
}

Fields returned: title, date, category, type, description, imageUrl, tags, url.

Practical uses

• Build a feed of EFSA publications for a food safety dashboard
• Track when EFSA publishes new opinions on specific ingredients or contaminants
• Compile a dataset of all EFSA scientific outputs mentioning a particular substance
• Monitor news related to upcoming EU food regulations

Good to know

• EFSA's site is a Drupal CMS. The scraper follows standard Drupal pagination (?page=1, ?page=2, ...) so it picks up multi-page result sets automatically.
• Tags come from both the page's <meta name="keywords"> and any visible tag elements on the article page.
• The type field distinguishes between news items, scientific opinions, reasoned opinions, supporting publications, etc.