FSA Food Alerts

FSA Food Alerts

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) Food Alerts API provides UK food safety alerts including product recalls, allergy alerts, and food alerts for action.

Alert Types

• AA — Allergy Alert: product may contain undeclared allergens.
• PRIN — Product Recall Information Notice: product recalled for safety reasons (contamination, incorrect labelling, etc.).
• FAFA — Food Alert For Action: enforcement action required by local authorities.

Data Model

• Alert — Core entity with notation (ID like FSA-PRIN-01-2026), title, description, created date.
• Problem — Risk statement and allergen details attached to an alert.
• Product Details — Affected products with names, pack sizes, batch codes, best-before dates.
• Reporting Business — The company issuing the recall.

Key Patterns

• List endpoint supports type filter (AA, PRIN, FAFA), since date filter, _limit and _offset.
• Alert IDs follow the pattern FSA-{TYPE}-{NUMBER}-{YEAR} (e.g. FSA-PRIN-01-2026).
• Single alert endpoint: /id/{notation} returns full details including consumer advice and related media.

Gotchas

• No auth: Completely open API under OGL v3.
• Date format: since parameter takes YYYY-MM-DD format.
• HTML in descriptions: Some fields contain raw HTML markup — strip tags if displaying as plain text.
• Pagination: Uses _limit and _offset (not page/pageSize).