Glossary
food recall notice
Food recall notice is one announced regulatory recall event, carrying date, brand, product description, recall reason and company name. FDA keeps a rolling three-year window of roughly 1,025 notices online with Excel export, moving older years into a separate archive.
What is food recall notice?
A food recall notice is an event record: one row per announced recall, each linking to a structured detail page. FDA's Recalls, Market Withdrawals & Safety Alerts listing carries every announced US recall with date, brand, product description, product type, recall reason and company name, filterable by regulated product category and terminated status. Food is the largest single category among the approximately 1,025 notices live on the page at any moment. Retention is the operational catch: content is kept for three years online, then moved to the Recall and Safety Alerts Archive, while openFDA holds the multi-decade archive back to 2004-era event IDs. The page is a server-rendered HTML table with XLSX export, updated daily.
Why does food recall notice matter when choosing a dataset?
Recall data is event data with retention rules, and both properties bite unprepared pipelines.
- The live page forgets on purpose. A three-year window plus an older archive means a naive scrape today is missing every pre-window year; longitudinal work needs openFDA's archive back to 2004-era event IDs.
- Bot protection sits between you and the table. fda.gov runs Akamai abuse detection that redirects unauthenticated automated clients to an apology page; browser-like headers with cookies and low request rates are required.
- Event fields are short. Brand, product description, reason and company are what you get - no lot-level quantity or financial exposure numbers ride along.
How do you evaluate food recall notice in a data source?
- Confirm which window your source covers. The live listing holds roughly 1,025 notices across three years; the Recall and Safety Alerts Archive holds older years, and openFDA reaches back to 2004-era event IDs.
- Test export before promising bulk. The table exports to Excel (XLSX); verify column parity between the live page and archived files before merging.
- Plan collection around Akamai. Unauthenticated automated requests get 302-redirected to /apology_objects/abuse-detection-apology.html - use browser-like headers, cookies and low rates.
- Prefer openFDA for redistribution. The companion openFDA service returns a licence URL (open.fda.gov/license) with every response and should carry any bulk redistribution.
- Deduplicate across channels. The same event can appear on the live list, in the archive and in openFDA; key on date, brand and company rather than row order.
Related terms
Entries that sit next to food recall notice in this glossary:
Frequently asked questions
How far back does the FDA recall list go?
The searchable listing keeps a rolling three-year window of about 1,025 notices; older years move to the Recall and Safety Alerts Archive, and openFDA preserves the multi-decade record back to 2004-era event IDs.
Is the FDA recall list free to use?
Yes. Content is a US Government work in the commercial delivery terms with no explicit licence statement on the page, though openFDA responses attach their own licence URL for bulk reuse.
What fields does each recall notice include?
Date, brand, product description, product type, recall reason and company name, one row per announced event with links to structured detail pages noting affected states.
Datasets containing this field
Datasets containing food recall notice
6 datasets carry food recall notice in the catalog. Open one, count the fields, judge for yourself.
Data.gov - Food-Tagged structured datasets Collection
Nutritionix Natural Language & Grocery API
Data.gov Retail Catalog (552k+ Datasets Federated Search)
title · description · publisher.name …+8 more
Edamam Food Database API
Eurostat - European Statistical Office Data Portal Data
FAOSTAT Food and Agriculture Statistics
Area Code / Area Code (M49) / Area · Item Code / Item Code (CPC) / Item · Element Code / Element …+5 more
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