An independent watch for federal product recalls.

What we do

Recall Weekly monitors four U.S. federal agencies — the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) — and emails personalized, plain-English alerts to subscribers when a recall affects their household.

We are an independent service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any government agency.

Why we built it

Federal recall notices are critical safety information, but they're written for compliance attorneys, not the people who actually own the products. A typical FDA enforcement record runs hundreds of words of regulatory language before telling you what to throw away. Agency mailing lists send everything — hundreds of items a year, most irrelevant to any given household.

Recall Weekly does two things the agencies don't: we filter to the recalls that match the products in your home, and we rewrite the notice into plain English — what happened, and what to do right now.

Where the data comes from

All recall data on this site originates from publicly available federal feeds:

• CPSC — consumer products, toys, appliances, baby and child gear (cpsc.gov/Recalls)
• FDA — food, drug, and medical device enforcement records, plus FDA press releases for early notice (Recalls, Market Withdrawals, & Safety Alerts)
• USDA-FSIS — meat, poultry, and processed egg products (fsis.usda.gov/recalls)
• NHTSA — vehicles, tires, child seats, and equipment (nhtsa.gov/recalls)

Every recall page on this site links back to the originating agency notice. The agency notice is always the authoritative record.

How we process recalls

We poll the four agency feeds every four hours. Newly published recalls are normalized into a common shape, categorized (food, pharmaceutical, vehicle, baby gear, and so on), and matched against subscriber profiles. Records that affect a subscriber's household are queued for the Sunday Brief — or, for premium subscribers, sent same-day if severity warrants it.

Plain-English summaries are generated by a large language model under tight editorial constraints. The model is given the full agency notice and asked to write a one-line headline, a short paragraph describing what happened, and a bulleted list of what the consumer should do. The original notice is always linked alongside the summary.

Editorial standards

• The agency notice is authoritative. If our plain-English summary and the original notice ever disagree, the original notice wins. Every recall page and every email links to the agency source.
• We don't downgrade severity. Translation may simplify language, but a Class I recall is always called a Class I recall. We have a deterministic severity floor that prevents the LLM from softening hazard language.
• We don't add facts.Summaries are restricted to information present in the agency notice. We don't speculate on cause, blame, or consequences.
• Corrections are public.If we get something wrong — a wrong brand, a missed UPC, a misclassified hazard — email us and we'll fix the page.

What we don't do

Recall Weekly is not a substitute for medical, legal, or professional advice. We summarize what federal agencies have published. If a recall affects something you own and you're unsure how to act, contact the manufacturer using the consumer contact information in the original notice, or consult an appropriate professional.

We do not yet cover state-level recalls, foreign-agency recalls, or voluntary withdrawals that aren't published through the federal feeds. We flag this honestly: if a product is unsafe but no federal agency has issued a recall, you will not hear about it from us.

Who runs Recall Weekly

Recall Weekly is built and maintained by a small independent team. We started it because federal recall notices are written for lawyers, and we wanted our own households to get told the things that matter — without having to read the Federal Register.

We answer email at hello@recallweekly.com. Press inquiries, correction requests, partnership questions, and bug reports all go to the same address.

The fine print

Read our terms and disclaimerfor the full liability and data-use policy. The short version: we do our best, federal feeds aren't perfect, and you should always treat the agency notice as authoritative.