United States/Recall enforcement/2026
And the shelves are only where you notice it.
Eggs. Lettuce. Cheese. Nut mixes. Every line below is a real recall the FDA filed in the last twelve months — pulled straight from openFDA, not typed by hand. Food is the focus here. It is not the whole picture: the same system pulls medicines and medical devices too, and there are more of those.
Ahead of the database
Tap any post to open it on X
The FDA's enforcement database publishes on a lag — roughly a week behind the news. These have broken on X but haven't reached the ledgers below yet. Not all of them are food.
Source: openFDA · rolling 12-month window
One row per recall, not per product
Recalling firm by state—
Actions filed by month—
Drugs & medical devices
Same database, other endpoints
Food is where most people notice it, but it isn't where most of it happens. The FDA files enforcement actions against medicines and medical devices through the same system — and by volume there are more of them than there are food recalls. The saline bags, the implants, the injectables.
2012–2026 archive
87,010 listings rolled up
The ledgers above show who filed a recall. That is not the same as who owns the company. Philips files under 20 different names, Medtronic under 29, GE under 29 — so counting by filing name understates the biggest players by two to four times. We rolled all 9,054 filing entities up to their corporate parents, then joined each one to the federal contracts it holds.
Of 87,010 recalls filed since 2012, the FDA compelled 708. Everything else was voluntary. Meanwhile the companies filing the most are among the government’s larger medical suppliers — Pfizer alone holds $36.1B in federal contract obligations.
Open the ownership map →Every action in the ledger above is a product that reached a shelf before anyone caught it. The data is public because the law says it has to be. Reading it is the easy part — here is what actually moves.
The FDA emails recalls the day they're posted, days before most outlets pick them up. Free, and it covers everything, not just the stories that trend.
Subscribe at fda.gov ↗ 02A great many recalls begin with one person reporting one bad package. If something made you sick or looked wrong, file it — or call 1-888-SAFEFOOD.
Report a problem to the FDA ↗ 03Inspection frequency, staffing and enforcement authority are set by Congress, not by the agency. The people who decide the budget work for you.
Find your representative ↗None of these links are ours and none of them cost anything. They go straight to the agencies that publish the data this page reads.
