Deep Dive

Food Safety & Policy

FDA food recalls and food-related federal rulemaking, live from openFDA and the Federal Register.

In 2025, the FDA recorded — food recalls — down from — in 2017 — though Class I recalls, the FDA's most serious category, fell by less: —.

Food recalls, 2017–2026

Pulled live from openFDA's Food Enforcement database. Grouped by FDA severity classification or by the recall's stated reason.

Group by

Trump I · 2017–2021 Biden · 2021–2025 Trump II · 2025–present

2026 covers Jan 1 – Aug 20 only (partial year) — not directly comparable to full-year bars. Class I = reasonably likely to cause serious harm or death; Class II = temporary or reversible harm; Class III = unlikely to cause harm. Recall-reason buckets are our own keyword grouping of each recall's free-text "reason for recall" field — see note below.

Show the numbers

Source: openFDA Food Enforcement API (U.S. FDA). Recall-reason categories are a keyword-based grouping we built over the FDA's free-text "reason_for_recall" field — the FDA does not publish its own category taxonomy for this field, so treat "Recall reason" groupings as an approximation, not an official FDA classification. FDA severity classes (I/II/III) are the FDA's own official designation.

Policy Timeline

FDA food-related final rules & guidance, 2017–2026

Every entry below is a link to the primary document on the U.S. Federal Register — no summaries or commentary added. This list is filtered to — substantive rules and guidance documents out of — total FDA filings matching "food safety," with purely procedural filings (sponsor-of-record changes, hearing-objection responses, effective-date confirmations) removed. See the full, unfiltered list on federalregister.gov ↗

Source: Federal Register API (National Archives), filtered to agency = Food and Drug Administration, type = Rule, term = "food safety", published 2017-01-01 or later. Same live-refreshed data as the main page.