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EAT SAFELY

U.S. FOOD SAFETY ALERTS

Independent public-information service. Eat Safely is not a government agency. Information is summarized from official sources.
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Methodology

We organize official food-safety information around what you may need to check, avoid, or know. We do not independently determine whether a food is safe.

From official notice to readable record

  1. Check public sources. Automated source checks are intended to run daily around 8:00 AM Pacific Time. Timing and source availability can vary; this is not a real-time alert service.
  2. Organize the information. We bring food names, consumer actions, source dates, and available product details into a consistent format. Related source records may be grouped to avoid repeating the same incident.
  3. Keep current action separate from history. Current advisories, investigations, and recall notices support check-or-avoid and awareness records. openFDA enforcement reports are historical/supporting information and do not drive current map activity. Resolved incidents appear separately.

What a state association means

We use explicit information from official sources to associate a record with a state. These relationships are different:

  • Illnesses reported here: the source reports illnesses associated with the state. This is not necessarily where the food was bought.
  • Distributed here: the source identifies distribution to the state. This does not confirm a sale at every store.
  • Sold here: available source information identifies sales or retailer distribution in the state. It is not a claim about every branch or product.
  • Previous or unspecified association: the record is labeled accordingly, without upgrading it to a current sale or illness claim.

Map shading represents state-level associations, not exact exposure locations. We do not infer county-level impact or plot store locations without supporting evidence. No current record found is not a guarantee of safety.

Products, retailers, and counts

Retailer names come from source evidence. A logo only helps identify an already-named retailer; having a logo in our library never adds a retailer to an incident.

Product and retailer details may be grouped or shortened for readability. Food-record counts are not counts of unique products, and illness-linked record counts are not numbers of people. National counts avoid counting the same record again for each state.

Some lists show only the most recent records. When a current list is limited, we distinguish its total from the records included in visual summaries. Check the original notice for exact products, package sizes, lot codes, and retailer details.

Dates and updates

A record's source update date describes the agency information. Header freshness uses the latest stored result for each official source when run metadata is available, without claiming those results form one complete cycle. Before that metadata exists, “Latest source retrieval” is a limited record-level fallback. Times are shown in Pacific Time. The Refresh button rereads available records rather than starting a new agency check.

Sources, automated processing, and summaries can contain gaps or errors. Follow current official agency guidance if it differs from our summary. Learn more about our data sources.