openFDA Food Enforcement / Recall Aggregator

Fetch and filter FDA food recall enforcement reports from the public openFDA Food Enforcement API into a clean Apify dataset.

This Actor calls https://api.fda.gov/food/enforcement.json only. It does not scrape websites, bypass rate limits, or access private data.

Features

• Keyword search across product description, recall reason, and recalling firm
• Filters: classification (Class I / II / III), status, firm, state, country
• Date range on report / initiation / classification / termination dates
• Automatic pagination (up to 5,000 records; openFDA page size 1,000)
• Flat, analysis-ready dataset rows + run summary in key-value store
• Optional openFDA API key for higher rate limits (~240 req/min vs ~40)

Input

Field	Type	Description
keyword	string	Free-text keyword (OR across key fields)
search	string	Raw Lucene query (AND-combined with filters)
classification	string	Class I, Class II, or Class III
status	string	Ongoing, Terminated, Completed
recallingFirm	string	Company name phrase
state / country	string	Firm location filters
dateField	string	Which date field the range uses
dateFrom / dateTo	string	YYYYMMDD inclusive bounds
limit	integer	Max records (1–5000, default 100)
skip	integer	Offset (max 25000)
sort	string	e.g. report_date:desc
apiKey	string (secret)	Optional openFDA API key
includeRawOpenfda	boolean	Keep nested openfda object

Example input

{
  "keyword": "allergen",
  "classification": "Class I",
  "dateFrom": "20240101",
  "dateTo": "20261231",
  "limit": 100,
  "sort": "report_date:desc"
}

Output

Each dataset item is one recall / enforcement report, including:

recall_number, event_id, status, classification, product_description, reason_for_recall, recalling_firm, city, state, country, distribution_pattern, product_quantity, report_date, recall_initiation_date, voluntary_mandated, code_info, fetched_at, source, source_url.

A summary is stored as key-value record OUTPUT_SUMMARY.

The Actor Output schema (required by Apify Store publishing) lives in .actor/output_schema.json and is linked from .actor/actor.json as "output". Dataset field layout remains in .actor/dataset_schema.json. After changing these files, rebuild the Actor so Publishing can detect the schema.

Use cases

• Food-safety monitoring dashboards
• Allergen / pathogen recall alerts for retailers and brands
• Compliance research and competitive intelligence
• Downstream enrichment for AI / RAG pipelines

Compliance & attribution

• Data source: openFDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)
• Terms of service · License
• Do not rely on openFDA alone for medical or regulatory decisions. Results may be incomplete or delayed.
• This Actor respects public API limits and retries politely on HTTP 429/5xx.

Pricing (suggested)

Recommended monetization: Pay-per-event (PPE) — rental is sunset for new Actors.

Suggested events:

Event	Suggested FREE-tier price	Notes
apify-actor-start	$0.00005 (platform default)	Covers first seconds of compute
apify-default-dataset-item	$0.0008 – $0.0015 per result	~$0.80–$1.50 per 1,000 recalls

Offer ~10% off Silver and ~20% off Gold vs FREE. Start near $0.001 / result; adjust after real usage.

Changelog

1.0.1

• Wire Apify Output schema (.actor/output_schema.json) so Store publishing can detect run output

1.0.0

• Initial release: openFDA food enforcement query, filters, pagination, structured dataset