What public data can tell you - and what it cannot
You can watch public FDA records for a product, brand or ingredient. Before that is useful, it has to be honest about how little it proves.
What it does
You choose terms to watch - a product name, a brand, an ingredient. Public FDA adverse event reports, enforcement actions and recalls are checked against them, and matches appear with a freshness indicator showing when the data was last retrieved.
What it cannot tell you
- It cannot establish that a product caused anything. Nothing in public reporting data supports a causal claim.
- Reports are voluntary, incomplete and unverified. They are what somebody chose to submit, not a record of what happened.
- A match is a prompt to look, never a finding. Shared ingredient names produce matches that have nothing to do with your product.
- An absence of matches means nothing. It is not evidence that your products are safe, and it should never be read as reassurance.
What we will not call it
This is not recall prediction, and it is not risk detection. We do not use those names, and we will not build a feature that implies a public dataset can forecast a regulatory action - because it cannot, and a merchant acting on that belief would be worse off than one who never looked.
What it is: a way to see what has been publicly reported about ingredients and products like yours, with the limits stated every time.
Nothing of yours is sent
Searching public FDA data sends a product, brand or ingredient name and a date range. No merchant data and no consumer data ever leaves the app for this. openFDA is listed in the subprocessor table in our trust centre for that reason.
See it on a real case
Ten steps, about four minutes, no signup. All data fictional.