About & methodology

Exact sources, coverage windows, and the limits of what this site claims.

What this site is

Recall Bench merges the U.S. government's separate recall feeds into one place. Recalls are scattered across agencies by product type — food under FDA, meat and poultry under USDA, consumer products under CPSC, vehicles under NHTSA — with no unified public dashboard (recalls.gov is a portal of links). We fetch each agency's official feed nightly and publish the merged tables plus stable CSVs. We add no editorial judgment: every row links to the official notice, and that notice — not this site — is authoritative for lot codes, UPCs, and remedies.

Sources, exactly

• FDA (enforcement) — openFDA food enforcement API: FDA-classified recalls of FDA-regulated (human) food, coverage from 2012. We display the last 180 days on food recalls and query full history for formula and brand pages. Note: this database contains essentially no pet food (we verified by probing brand and category terms directly).
• FDA (announcements) — Recalls, Market Withdrawals & Safety Alerts feed: company recall announcements FDA posts, from October 2017. This is the only feed here that covers pet food (Animal & Veterinary category); FDA removes some older or withdrawn announcements, so absence from this feed is weak evidence.
• USDA-FSIS — FSIS recall API: recalls and public health alerts for meat, poultry, and processed egg products, coverage from 2014. Full mirror in the CSV; last 365 days on the meat & poultry page.
• CPSC — saferproducts.gov recall API: consumer product recalls. We show a rolling 120-day window on product recalls.
• NHTSA (vehicles) — not tracked. NHTSA's API is a per-vehicle lookup rather than a browsable feed; check your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls.

Method & limits

The site is rebuilt nightly; every page footer shows the refresh time. FDA enforcement rows are grouped into recall events by event_id, since one recall often spans dozens of product entries. Brand pages state each database's coverage window and never claim a brand "has never been recalled" — only that no match appears in a named database over a stated window. The same recall can legitimately appear twice (as an announcement, then as enforcement entries). We publish no predictions, no severity opinions, and no health advice. If a recall matters to you, act on the linked official notice, not on this summary.

Contact

Corrections and questions: contact@recallbench.com. Data is public-domain; cite this site by linking any page.