CPSC vs FDA Recalls: What Each Agency Covers (and What They Don't)
Type a product into the wrong recall database and you will find nothing — which reads as “no recall”, when the truth is “wrong agency”. The two US systems that produce most of the notices we track look similar from the outside and are organised completely differently.
CPSC: things in your home
The Consumer Product Safety Commission covers consumer products: toys and children’s equipment, furniture, appliances, tools, clothing, sports equipment, household chemicals, candles, mattresses, bicycle helmets. Its recall notices are published as complete documents — product description, photographs, model and date codes, the number of units, where they were sold, the hazard, and the remedy.
Practically, the CPSC data is built for identification. A notice tells you what to look for on the product and what to do about it. Reports of unsafe products come in through SaferProducts.gov, which is also where consumers can file them.
FDA: what you eat, drink, swallow or wear
The Food and Drug Administration covers food, drugs, biologics, medical devices, cosmetics and tobacco products. Food and drug recalls are usually firm-initiated: a company discovers a problem, pulls product and issues a notice; the FDA classifies the recall and publishes it.
The public record of these is the enforcement report series, distributed through openFDA as structured data. That structure is excellent for monitoring and poor for identification: enforcement records describe the product by firm, catalogue number and lot, and they do not include product photographs at all. The details that do identify an affected unit live in the lot, batch or best-before code.
The differences that matter when you are checking a product
- Identification. CPSC notices are visual and model-based. FDA records are textual and lot-based. If your product is a food or a medicine, the lot code is the thing to find.
- Terminology. FDA recalls are classified into three levels of health consequence (Class I, II and III). CPSC does not use that scale — it describes the hazard, and severity has to be read from the notice.
- Photographs. CPSC recalls frequently include them; FDA enforcement records do not. That is why on our alerts some cards carry a product photo and many do not — we show what the source publishes and never substitute an illustration.
- Volume. Food, drug and device records dominate the total volume of published notices. Consumer product recalls are far fewer in number, and often more individually consequential.
Where vehicles fit, and why they are separate
Cars, tyres and child car seats are handled by NHTSA, with a lookup keyed on VIN. If the product is a vehicle or vehicle equipment, neither of the two databases above is the right starting point.
What this means for us
securiteconso.org tracks the CPSC recall stream and the openFDA enforcement records, summarises each entry in English, keeps the source publication linked and quotes the hazard rather than replacing it. We do not rewrite the notice, and we do not fill the gaps the source leaves — if the FDA record has no image, our card has no image.
What we add is cadence and reachability: a single list, refreshed every six hours, filterable by source and category, and delivered as alerts if you want them. See the current alerts or follow the categories you care about.
Sources: CPSC · openFDA · NHTSA recalls