Method
How SupplierRadar collects FDA data
SupplierRadar builds every supplier page from five public FDA sources, checks import alerts every day and the other four every week, and shows on each page when it was last checked.
Data from FDA public records, last checked .
The five sources
| Source | Checked | What it adds | Records | Last fetched |
|---|
- Daily: FDA updates alert pages in real time, and the promise to watchers is a report within a day.
- Weekly: FDA's Data Dashboard says the refusal dataset is updated weekly.
- Weekly: FDA posts warning letters weekly.
- Weekly: The Data Dashboard says inspection classifications are updated weekly.
- Weekly: openFDA's enforcement reports are published weekly.
What is in scope
Included: human food (including alcoholic beverages, food additives and color additives), dietary supplements and non-medicated animal food, for firms located outside the United States.
Not included: drugs, biologics, devices, cosmetics, tobacco and radiological products, and firms located in the United States and its territories. Import alerts are kept when they are numbered under a food industry code or are general 99-series alerts; for the 99-series, only listings with a food product are kept.
FSVP warning letters: FDA addresses these to U.S. importers and redacts the foreign supplier, so they cannot be tied to a supplier and are not shown on supplier pages.
How the data is read
Import alerts come from the alert list and each alert's page on FDA's website. The Data Dashboard datasets (refusals, inspections, warning letters) come from the same public dashboard download FDA offers on each dashboard page. Recalls come from openFDA's food enforcement bulk file, matched to firms through the Data Dashboard.
Each site's robots.txt is honored, including crawl delays and visiting hours. A daily alert run downloads only the alert pages whose publish date changed, so it makes a handful of requests, not thousands.
Every event keeps the URL of the FDA page it came from, and the "Source" link next to it opens that page. FDA does not publish a page per refused shipment, so a refusal links to the firm's FDA profile.
How suppliers are matched
- FEI. A record with FDA's Establishment Identifier belongs to the firm with that FEI. Every refusal, inspection and warning letter carries one, and FDA's own match gives an FEI to 97.7% of import alert listings.
- Two FEIs are never merged, even when the names are identical: FDA gives each establishment its own FEI.
- No FEI? The record is matched on a normalized name, the same country and the same city, and the street address must fit one FDA has linked to that firm.
- Uncertain cases are split, never merged. A wrong merge would put one firm's record on another firm's page; two pages for one firm only costs a click. Uncertain cases go to a review list.
How to find a supplier's FEI explains the identifier.
The guard
Before a weekly run is published, each new FDA file is compared with the previous one. If a file has far fewer rows than before, which would look like a mass removal, the run is held: nothing is published, no alert email is sent, and a control email goes to the team to check FDA's source.
Re-running on the same data changes nothing. Each event is stored once, keeps the date it was first detected, and a supplier's page only changes when FDA's record does.
Known limits
- Refusals start with shipments refused on or after October 1, 2016, the range of FDA's current dashboard.
- Import alert pages show only the current state. SupplierRadar builds the history of additions and removals from the day it started tracking, so earlier removals are not known.
- Warning letters come from the Data Dashboard table, which covers letters issued from January 2021 and has fewer letters than FDA's own listing; a letter missing there cannot be placed in a country and is not shown.
- Alert pages carry no FEI, so a listing without FDA's FEI match is placed by name, country and city.
Corrections policy
Anyone can ask for a correction without an account. We compare the record with the FDA source, fix our data if it differs, and reply by email, usually within 48 hours. If FDA's own record is wrong, we say so and point to FDA, because we show what FDA published.
What SupplierRadar never does
- No scores, grades or rankings of suppliers.
- No recommendation to buy from, or avoid, a supplier. The evaluation and the decision stay with the importer, as 21 CFR 1.505 requires.
- No words such as dangerous, risky, banned or blacklisted. Pages say listed, refused, issued, removed and classified.
- No text written by a language model on supplier pages: every sentence is a template filled with FDA data, and a clause is dropped when its data is missing.
- No claim about what a yellow list listing means for detention, because FDA's own pages differ; pages say "on the yellow list" and link to the alert.
Questions about the data
- Where does SupplierRadar get its data?
- Entirely from public FDA records: the FDA import alert pages, the Data Dashboard's import refusals, warning letters and inspection classifications, and openFDA's food enforcement (recall) reports. No source needs a login or a paid key, and every fact on a supplier page links to the FDA page it came from.
- How often is the data updated?
- Import alerts are checked every day. Import refusals, warning letters, inspection classifications and recalls are checked every week, which matches how often FDA updates them. Every page shows when it was last checked.
- How does SupplierRadar decide that two records belong to the same supplier?
- It uses FDA's own identifier first. A record with an FEI belongs to the firm with that FEI, and two FEIs are never merged, even if the names match. Only records without an FEI are matched by name, country, city and street address, and any uncertain case is kept as a separate firm rather than merged.
- What if a record on a supplier page is wrong?
- Request a correction from the supplier page or the corrections form. We check the request against the FDA source and reply by email, usually within 48 hours.
- Is SupplierRadar official FDA data?
- No. SupplierRadar is an independent service that organizes public FDA records. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the data may contain errors.
Built for the person who signs the FSVP file
Look before you order.
Check up to five suppliers against every FDA record in one paste, no account needed. Watch the ones you buy from and get the source the day a record changes.
SupplierRadar is not affiliated with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Data comes from public FDA records and may contain errors. This is not legal advice; importers remain responsible for their supplier evaluations.