What this is
A map of US food recalls from 1 January 2012 to the present, built entirely from primary federal sources. Every fact shown traces back to an agency record, and every popup links to it. Where a value was not reported by the agency, this site says not reported rather than filling the gap.
This is not real-time data, and you should not treat it as such
Recalls appear in these feeds well after they begin. The median lag from recall initiation to publication runs around a month; roughly one in ten exceeds three months, and some exceed a year. The openFDA endpoint's own freshness stamp typically trails by a week or two on top of that.
For current food safety information, consult FDA recalls and USDA FSIS recalls directly. If you are deciding whether something in your kitchen is safe right now, this map is the wrong tool.
What "recalling firm location" means — and what it does not
Each point is the city of the firm that issued the recall, as the agency recorded it. That firm is frequently a distributor or processor, not the farm, grower, or manufacturer where a problem originated. Produce grown abroad routinely shows a US distributor's address.
So: a point on this map is not the origin of contamination, and it is not where the product was sold or eaten. It is an administrative address. This is the single easiest way to misread this map, which is why the label appears on the legend, in every record, and here.
Where a firm's city could not be matched in Census data, the point falls back to the centroid of its state and is drawn hollow with a dashed outline. Those coordinates are ours, not the agency's, and the record says so.
Coverage gaps you need to know about
- USDA FSIS data is not included. FSIS regulates meat, poultry and processed egg products, and it is a separate system from FDA's. Those recalls are entirely absent from this map. A search that finds no beef recall is telling you nothing about beef recalls.
- 368 recalls have a firm outside the United States and are not plotted. They are in the dataset and counted, but they have no point on a US map.
- Distribution is not mapped. The agency's distribution text is shown verbatim and has not been parsed into states. There is no spread layer yet, so this map shows where firms are, not where product went.
- No outbreak or illness data. CDC publishes that actively and an unofficial, lagging copy could do real harm during a live investigation.
Sources
- openFDA food enforcement API — every recall record.
- US Census Bureau Gazetteer files — coordinates for cities and county subdivisions.
- US Census Bureau cartographic boundary files — state outlines.
No news reports, no aggregators, no commercial recall trackers. If a fact exists only in a press write-up, it is not here.
How records are cited
openFDA publishes no permalink for an individual recall, so each record links to the API query that returns exactly it, pinned to its recall number. For a small number of recent records the agency has not yet assigned a recall number; those are cited by the recall event instead and are labelled event-level citation where they appear.
How food categories are assigned
Categories come from a committed keyword rulebook — a versioned list of terms matched against the agency's product description. No model decides a record's category at page load, and no record receives a best guess. A description that matches no rule is listed as uncategorised and stays fully findable by free-text search.
A record can carry more than one category, because many foods genuinely belong to several. Matching is scoped to the text before any ingredient list: a cookie that lists milk, eggs and lemon juice among its ingredients is a bakery item, not a dairy, egg and citrus product.
Categories are our interpretation of the agency's text, not the agency's own classification, and they are labelled as derived wherever they appear.
CDC outbreak investigations
59 CDC foodborne outbreak investigations have been ingested and are listed on the outbreak investigations page as a stored snapshot, with case counts and illness onset ranges as CDC reports them.
None of them is linked to a recall on this map, and none is presented as current. CDC notices name the implicated firm rather than a specific recall record; the FDA pages they link to carry no recall number; and openFDA's recall records contain no reference back. Linking them would require matching on firm name and dates, which is a guess, so they stay unlinked. For current outbreak information, use CDC directly.
Update frequency
This site is rebuilt manually, not on a schedule. The banner on the map shows both the time of our last successful fetch and openFDA's own last-updated stamp. If those dates look old, they are old — that is the point of showing them.
Corrections
If something here contradicts the agency record, that is a bug and worth reporting. Write to corrections@ushealthatlas.org.
Please include the recall number and the agency URL that contradicts what is shown, so the claim can be checked against the source rather than argued about. Corrections to the underlying agency record itself should go to FDA — this site reproduces what they publish and cannot change it.