Alerts Check a product

How we collect and check the data

FoodRecalls.co.uk turns official UK food alerts from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) into pages that are quick to search and check against a pack. We do not add recalls of our own, and we always link to the official notice.

Where the data comes from

All recalls come from the FSA Food Alerts API, the agency's public data service. It covers allergy alerts, product recall information notices and food alerts for action published since January 2018, including alerts that apply in Scotland. We currently hold 1,242 recalls. The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Food Standards Scotland publishes its alerts on its own website. Most of them are the same recalls the FSA publishes. Where an FSS alert matches an FSA recall (a closely matching title or product list, published within three weeks of each other), we add Scotland to that recall and link the FSS notice. Alerts that only FSS published are added as recalls of their own: 27 so far. FSS has no data feed, so we read its public alert pages, slowly and only when its list of alerts changes.

How often it updates

We check the FSA for new and changed alerts every 10 minutes, and re-check the whole dataset once a day. We check the FSS alert list on the same schedule. If an alert is withdrawn at the source, it is removed here too. The last successful check was 5 Oct, 15:50.

Updates to a recall

The FSA publishes changes to a recall as separate "update" notices. We group each update with the original alert, so one recall has one page. The page shows every update in date order and what changed, such as products or batch codes that were added.

What we add, and how

  • Who needs to act. For allergy alerts we name the allergens involved. For other recalls we say the recall applies to everyone who bought the product. Health information is attributed to the FSA or the NHS.
  • Date status. We read the use-by and best-before dates in each notice. If every affected batch has a clear end date, we show whether that date has passed. If any batch says "all dates", or a date cannot be read reliably, we do not show a date status.
  • Supermarkets. A recall is linked to a supermarket when the supermarket issued it, is named as a business in it, sells the product under its own label (for example "Tesco Finest"), or is named in the notice as a place it was sold. Many recalls of branded products do not list shops, so counts per supermarket are a minimum.
  • Hazards and food types. We group recalls by reason (for example listeria, plastic, wrong date labels) and by food type using published rules applied to the notice wording. These groupings help browsing; they are not part of the official notice.
  • Brand and food pages. A brand gets its own page once it has at least 3 recalls, and a type of food once it has at least 10. Below that, a page would say little that the recall itself doesn't, so those recalls are found through search, the archive and the other groupings instead.
  • Supermarket pages. We check each supermarket's refund policy and customer service details by hand against its own website and recall notices, and show the date we last checked. A supermarket page is only listed for search engines once that check is done.
  • Business names. The same business can appear under different spellings (for example "Lidl GB" and "Lidl Northern Ireland"). We combine these into one name.

Alerts

When a new recall is added, we send it to our RSS feeds and to anyone who has turned on browser alerts for a matching allergen, supermarket, brand or hazard. Alerts are sent within about 15 minutes of an alert appearing at the source. Recalls first published more than 14 days earlier (for example when an old alert is added late) are added to the site but not sent as alerts.

Limits you should know about

  • A search with no match does not mean a product is safe. Names on packs can differ from notices, and alerts before 2018 are not included.
  • Barcodes are rarely included in FSA notices, so we cannot reliably check by barcode.
  • Always compare the product name, pack size, batch code and date with the official notice before acting.

Mistakes

If something looks wrong, please report it. We check reports against the official notice and correct our pages.