Microproduct data guidebeginner

CPSC Product Recalls

Consumer product recall records for building bounded product-safety lookups and owner-notification tools.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Tiny · ≤0.05 GB
Formats
JSON, XML
Access
API
API key
Not required
Provider
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission
Updates
Daily
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

CPSC's Recall Retrieval service returns consumer product recalls as JSON. Start with a short date window; an unfiltered request can return the entire catalog. A recall record is not a current inventory check, and date parameters must be spelled exactly.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the CPSC recalls page and note that the retrieval service lives on saferproducts.gov.
  2. 2.Query JSON for a bounded recall-date window.
  3. 3.Keep recall numbers, titles, and dates before summarizing hazards.
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3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://www.saferproducts.gov/RestWebServices/Recall",
    params={
        "format": "json",
        "RecallDateStart": "2025-01-01",
        "RecallDateEnd": "2025-03-31",
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
recalls = pd.DataFrame(response.json())
recalls["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(recalls[["RecallNumber", "Title", "RecallDate"]].head(20))
4

Test a useful signal

Summarize first-quarter consumer product recalls

Identify which product titles appear most often in a bounded CPSC recall window.

  1. 01Confirm the request used RecallDateStart and RecallDateEnd rather than an unfiltered dump.
  2. 02Count recalls by month and inspect a sample of titles and hazards.
  3. 03State that CPSC recalls are not vehicle or food-enforcement records and that remedy status can change after publication.

Dataset details

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-17. Temporal coverage: 1973-present.

Theme

Health, Food & Safety

Domains

Consumer SafetyPublic HealthRegulation

Data types

Event DataTabular

Tasks

Recall LookupSafety MonitoringAlerting

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONXML

Provider

U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance