About this site.
That's Not Safe to Eat is a free site by Jon Levesque, a former executive at Microsoft and DocuSign, that turns FDA and USDA recall notices into a plain-English list of what you can't eat right now and where it was sold, updated daily.
What this is
As of Sep 3, 2026, 49 notices are on the list: 28 recalls, 0 outbreaks, and 21 advisories, plus 21 notices that have been called off and stay searchable. They come from 2 government sources: FDA Enforcement Reports (openFDA) and USDA FSIS recall alerts (email). The last successful pipeline run finished Sep 2, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC. 0 items are waiting for a human before publishing. The site launched in September 2026.
Every incident page shows the status, the severity, the products with their lot codes and UPCs, where the product was sold, what to do, the link to the government notice, and how many days the government took to list it. You can browse by state, store, allergen, or hazard, or search a brand, product, UPC, or lot code.
How it works
Five steps, in order. Sources: every morning the pipeline pulls the FDA's enforcement reports through openFDA, and USDA FSIS notices arrive by email as they are sent. Extraction: a language model reads each notice and pulls out the brand, products, codes, dates, hazard, regions, and retailers, and writes the plain-English summary, extracting only what the notice states. Rubric: a fixed set of rules turns the kind of notice into the status you see, and the source's recall class into the severity. Gate: anything the model rates below 0.8 confidence waits for a person. Publish: the incident goes on the list with its source link, and the FDA's delay is measured from the FDA's own dates.
The reasoning behind each step is on Why this exists; whether each step worked today is on Status.
Who built this
Built by Jon Levesque, a former executive at Microsoft and DocuSign, who also built BuyPerUnit, a price-per-unit comparison site. The reason is simple: the government publishes recalls weekly, in PDF, in a dialect only lawyers speak, and the food stays in your fridge the whole time. The longer version is on the Why this exists page.
As mentioned in
No coverage yet. Journalists: see the press kit.
Questions
What is That's Not Safe to Eat?
That's Not Safe to Eat is a free site by Jon Levesque, a former executive at Microsoft and DocuSign, that turns FDA and USDA recall notices into a plain-English list of what you can't eat right now and where it was sold, updated daily. Every item links to the government notice it came from, and nothing is listed without one.
See: The list
Where does the data come from?
Two government sources right now: the FDA's weekly enforcement reports, read through the openFDA API, and USDA FSIS recall and Public Health Alert notices, which arrive by email because the FSIS website blocks requests from the network this site runs on. The status page lists every source with the time it was last checked and whether it worked.
How often does it update?
A pipeline run starts every day at 13:00 UTC (6 a.m. Pacific) and re-reads the last 14 days of FDA enforcement reports, so recalls that gain products are rewritten in place. FSIS notices are processed the moment the email arrives. The last successful run finished Sep 2, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC.
See: What arrived when
What does the AI do, and what does it not do?
A language model reads each notice and extracts the brand, products, UPCs, lot codes, dates, hazard, regions, and retailers, then writes the plain-English summary and what to do. It is instructed to extract only what the notice states and never to fill gaps. It does not decide the status: "Do not eat", "Caution", and "All clear" come from fixed rules based on the kind of notice the source published, and severity comes from the source's recall class. Anything the model rates below 0.8 confidence is held for a human and never shown publicly.
See: Why this exists
How do I report an error?
Use the report-an-error form, linked from every incident page and from the footer. Errors are fixed within 24 hours of being reported, and every correction is logged publicly on the corrections page. A wrong lot code or a wrong brand matters more here than on most websites.
See: Report an error · Corrections log