FDA Recall Monitor: Device, Drug & Food Recall Alerts

Get alerted the moment the FDA recalls a device, drug or food product you track. Filter by firm, product, classification (Class I, Class II or Class III) or status, schedule it, and it returns only the recalls that are new since your last run, straight to Slack or your workflow. Data comes from the official openFDA enforcement API, no key required.

Built for compliance and regulatory-affairs teams, product-liability and mass-tort lawyers, quality and supply-chain risk managers, and analysts or short-sellers who need to know about an FDA action before it hits the news.

Why this actor

• One watchlist, a real diff: instead of re-reading the whole recall database every day, this keeps a persistent memory of what it has already seen and returns only new recalls plus the ones whose status moved (for example Ongoing to Terminated).
• Change types you can route on: every monitor row is tagged new or status-changed (with the previous status), so you can alert on a fresh Class I recall specifically.
• Three databases, one query: device, drug and food recalls in a single run, each row tagged with its category.
• Official source, no key, no scraping: every field comes from the openFDA enforcement endpoints (api.fda.gov/{device,drug,food}/enforcement.json). Public, keyless and open.
• Flat schema, no JSON spelunking: recall number, firm, product, reason, classification, status, dates and location as plain columns.
• Monitor mode with a Slack-compatible webhook digest: schedule it and get pinged only when a recall you care about appears or changes.
• Fair pricing: you pay per recall actually returned. A quiet day on a scheduled watchlist costs almost nothing.

Use cases

• Regulatory affairs / compliance: watch your own firm and your suppliers so a recall on a component you use never surprises you.
• Product-liability / mass-tort law: monitor a device or drug class and catch new Class I actions the day they post.
• Quality and supply-chain risk: track ingredient or contract-manufacturer names across the food and drug databases.
• Analysts and short-sellers: watch a public company and get an alert when the FDA reports or escalates a recall.
• AI agents: plug it into Claude, Cursor or any MCP client and ask, "any new Class I device recalls this week?"

Input

{
    "categories": ["drug", "device"],
    "classification": "Class I",
    "status": "Ongoing",
    "sinceDays": 90,
    "maxResults": 100
}

categories picks which recall databases to search (device, drug, food; default all three). searchTerms is optional: firm names or product keywords, each matched against the recalling firm or the product description and combined with OR. classification is Class I, Class II, Class III or Any. status is Ongoing, Completed, Terminated or Any. sinceDays sets the report-date look-back window.

Monitor specific companies for a Slack alert (scheduled run):

{
    "categories": ["device", "drug", "food"],
    "searchTerms": ["Abbott", "Baxter"],
    "sinceDays": 30,
    "monitorMode": true,
    "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxx/yyy/zzz"
}

Leave searchTerms empty to watch every recall in the selected categories and classification. The query is always scoped by category, classification and date window, so a run always returns something. If a query has zero matches, the run finishes cleanly with an empty dataset rather than failing.

Output (one record per new or changed recall)

{
    "recallNumber": "Z-2601-2026",
    "category": "device",
    "recallingFirm": "Abiomed, Inc.",
    "productDescription": "Impella ...",
    "reason": "...",
    "classification": "Class I",
    "status": "Ongoing",
    "reportDate": "2026-07-01",
    "initiationDate": "2026-06-12",
    "distributionPattern": "US Nationwide",
    "voluntaryMandated": "Voluntary: Firm initiated",
    "city": "Danvers",
    "state": "MA",
    "country": "United States",
    "changeType": "new",
    "previousStatus": null,
    "retrievedAt": "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Field	Meaning
recallNumber	The FDA recall number (unique per recall)
category	device, drug or food
recallingFirm	Company that initiated or is subject to the recall
productDescription	The recalled product, as filed with the FDA
reason	Reason for the recall
classification	Severity: Class I (most serious), Class II, Class III
status	Ongoing, Completed or Terminated
reportDate	Date the FDA reported the recall (ISO YYYY-MM-DD)
initiationDate	Date the firm initiated the recall (ISO YYYY-MM-DD)
distributionPattern	Where the product was distributed
voluntaryMandated	Whether the recall was voluntary or FDA-mandated
city / state / country	Recalling firm location
changeType	Monitor mode: new or status-changed; null on one-off runs
previousStatus	The prior status when changeType is status-changed; else null
retrievedAt	When this run fetched the recall

On a one-off run (monitorMode off) you get every match with changeType set to null. In monitor mode the first run seeds the baseline and reports everything as new; later runs return only new recalls plus any whose status changed.

Pricing

Pay per event, no subscription and no minimum. Users on higher Apify plans get automatic discounts.

Event	Price	When
Actor start	$0.00005	Flat, once per run
Recall found	$0.002	Per new or changed recall returned with its data
Digest sent	$0.03	Monitor mode only, per Slack/webhook digest actually posted

A thousand recalls costs $2. In monitor mode a quiet watchlist costs almost nothing: the persistent seen-set means you are never billed twice for the same unchanged recall, so a scheduled run that finds no changes only pays the tiny start fee. That is the difference from a raw export that bills you for the whole result set on every run.

FAQ

How do I get alerted about FDA Class I recalls? Set classification to Class I, turn on monitorMode, add a Slack (or any) webhook URL, and schedule the actor. You get a digest only when a new Class I recall appears or an existing one changes status, and you are only charged for the recalls returned.

Can I monitor recalls for a specific company? Yes. Put the firm name in searchTerms, for example ["Abbott"]. It matches the recalling firm and the product description, so a supplier named on the product also surfaces. Add several names to watch a portfolio.

Is openFDA data free? Yes. The openFDA enforcement API is public, keyless and open, so there is no login, no scraping and no third-party aggregator. This actor just adds the diffing, filtering, alerting and a flat schema on top.

Does it cover device, drug and food recalls? Yes, all three. categories selects any combination of device, drug and food; each output row is tagged with its category. Leave all three selected to catch everything.

How is this different from querying openFDA myself? The API returns the full matching set on every call. This actor remembers what it already showed you and returns only new recalls plus the ones whose status changed, tagged with the exact change. That is the difference between a query and a monitor.

Does it work with AI agents? Yes. Like every Apify actor it is exposed via REST API and MCP, so Claude, Cursor and similar tools can call it directly, for instance to answer "list new Class I food recalls from this month".

Tracking clinical trials too? See the sibling ClinicalTrials.gov Monitor for new-trial, phase and status alerts on the same pharma and medical-device pipeline.

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Something missing?

If you need an extra field, another source, or a different output, open an issue on this Actor and describe it. I read every request and small additions usually ship within days. More monitors and data Actors are on my profile.

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