Microproduct data guidebeginner

openFDA Food Enforcement Reports

FDA food-recall enforcement reports for building bounded product-safety monitors and recall-research tools.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.1 GB
Formats
JSON, ZIP
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Updates
Weekly
Data terms
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal, with noted third-party exceptions

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

The openFDA food-enforcement API returns classified FDA Recall Enterprise System reports for food products. Start with one hazard class and a bounded report-date window. Do not use this feed as a public-alert system, and do not treat recall status as current after classification.

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.Read the food-enforcement overview and the responsible-use disclaimer.
  2. 2.Query a bounded report-date window and one classification.
  3. 3.Preserve the exact query and retrieval timestamp before summarizing firms or products.
Open official source
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://api.fda.gov/food/enforcement.json",
    params={
        "search": 'classification:"Class I" AND report_date:[20250101 TO 20251231]',
        "limit": 20,
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
recalls = pd.DataFrame(response.json()["results"])
recalls["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(recalls[["recalling_firm", "product_description", "reason_for_recall", "report_date"]].head(20))
4

Test a useful signal

Summarize Class I food recalls in one year

Identify which firms and reasons appear most often in Class I food-enforcement reports for a bounded calendar year.

  1. 01Confirm the API returned classified enforcement reports for the selected year and Class I filter.
  2. 02Count reports by recalling firm and reason, noting that one event can expand to additional lots later.
  3. 03State that openFDA must not be used to issue public alerts and that recall status is not updated after classification.

Dataset details

U.S. Food and Drug Administration is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-14. Temporal coverage: 2004-present.

Theme

Health, Food & Safety

Domains

Food SafetyPublic Health

Data types

Event DataTabular

Tasks

Recall LookupSafety MonitoringAlerting

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONZIP

Provider

U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Data terms

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal, with noted third-party exceptions