The Recall
Manifesto.

A recall is a message. It says: we made something that hurts people, we are sorry, please stop using it. The people who need the message most are the people who bought the thing.

In theory, they hear the message. The company issues a press release. The FDA (or USDA, or CPSC) posts a notice. The news picks it up. Everyone with the product finds out. That's the theory.

The practice is different.

The practice is that in 2024, an estimated 48 million Americans got sick from foodborne illness. 128,000 were hospitalized. 3,000 died. Many of those illnesses trace back to products that had been recalled — sometimes weeks before the affected consumer ate them. The message existed. It just never reached the person who needed it.

Why doesn't the message reach them? Three reasons, all fixable.

First: the data lives in three broken places. The FDA runs one site. The USDA runs a different one. The CPSC runs a third. None cross-reference. None email anyone. All of them format their content for journalists and lawyers — press releases and legal notices — not for parents, allergy families, or pet owners.

Second: the news cycle only picks up the big ones. A recall of a listeriosis-linked deli meat with 10 deaths makes the network news. A recall of a specific lot of nut-flour cookies contaminated with peanut residue does not. The people affected by the small recall are the ones with the specific allergy — a small, targeted group that no news editor can be blamed for missing. That's exactly the population that a targeted alert system would reach easily.

Third: the companies don't want to notify you. Manufacturers issuing a recall are not incentivized to make sure every customer sees the notice. If they were, they'd have your email. They mostly don't. The recall goes on a webpage nobody visits, in a database nobody queries.

The FDA's openFDA API is free and requires no key. The USDA FSIS publishes recalls in an open feed. The CPSC has a public REST endpoint that returns every consumer-product recall since the 1970s. All three update on the order of hours or minutes when new recalls are added.

A serverless function polling those three APIs every ten minutes costs approximately zero dollars per month. Sending 10,000 targeted alert emails costs less than $5. A parent with a peanut-allergic kid should be able to sign up for "peanut, tree-nut, and sesame recalls" and get an email the moment one drops. There is no technical reason this doesn't exist. There is only the reason nobody bothered to build it — because the companies who benefit from the friction wouldn't fund it, and the government agencies charged with our safety weren't asked to.

So we built it.

What we won't compromise on:

Free, forever. The data is public. Aggregating it costs pennies. Charging for it would be a form of the same tax the friction represents — a barrier between people and the information they need to protect their families.

Never sold. Your email lives in one place: our alerts table. It is used for one purpose: sending you recall alerts that match your filters. If we sold it, we'd be doing the exact thing we accuse the current system of doing badly — treating you as a source of value instead of a person to serve.

Every recall cites its source. We don't editorialize. We don't rank recalls by our own judgment beyond what the FDA/USDA/CPSC classify them as. We just pass through the government's own severity tag, with a direct link back to the original announcement. If you want to verify, you can.

The three-agency siloing is theirs, not ours. If a chicken-tender product is recalled by the USDA and the packaging plastic is recalled by the CPSC, we surface both under your household filters. The government's three websites will make you check three different places. Ours won't.

If you're a parent, an allergy family, a pet owner, a caregiver, a nurse, a chef, a purchaser at a food service company — this is the alert list that should have existed twenty years ago. It didn't. We built it. It's free. Set your filters.

If you're a government agency reading this and you want to formally partner — we would love that. Our source of truth is your source of truth. We'd rather work with you than around you.

If you're the person who realized, six days after the fact, that the product you fed your kid was on last week's recall list — we're sorry. That shouldn't happen. That's why we built this.

— Ali Sina, on behalf of TOTAL RECALL
Newport Beach · August 2026