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 This is the only feed here that covers pet food (Animal & Veterinary category); FDA removes some older or withdrawn announcements, so absence from this feed is weak evidence.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.
- USDA-FSIS establishment directory - Meat, Poultry and Egg Product Inspection (MPI) Directory CSV plus its establishment demographic companion file: every federally inspected meat, poultry, and egg product plant with its establishment number, address, grant activities, and size class. Behind the EST number lookup (directory as of September 2, 2026). Plants are joined to FSIS recall notices strictly by establishment number written in the notice text, never by name. State-inspected and custom-exempt plants are not in the directory.
- CPSC - saferproducts.gov recall API: consumer product recalls, full database mirrored (coverage from 2000). The last 120 days are shown on product recalls; everything is in the CSV.
- NHTSA (vehicles) - NHTSA's recalls flat file (refreshed daily by NHTSA): every vehicle recall campaign since 2010, aggregated by campaign number for vehicle recalls and the per-make pages. Per-vehicle applicability is a VIN question - use 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. The FSIS feed's Spanish translation rows are excluded from counts (English
notices only). 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).
Every recall event from the last 24 months - plus every Class I food recall on record - has a
stable permanent page under /recall/, so a specific recall can
be linked or cited durably. Statistics pages count events (not
per-product rows). Hazard tags (Listeria, Salmonella, undeclared allergen, and so on) come from
a conservative keyword scan of each recall's official stated reason; recalls that don't clearly
name a hazard are left untagged, never guessed. If a live government feed is unreachable at
build time we serve the last good copy and label every affected figure with that copy's date.
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.