About
A personal project by Kien Dang, not a company.
Why I built this
I'm Kien, a developer in Canada. This isn't a company or a team, just a side project I started on a weekend in May 2025 and have kept running since.
There's no dramatic story behind it. Nothing was recalled on me and nobody got hurt, I was just tired of fighting with the official site. Health Canada publishes useful information about what's been recalled, how risky it is and what you should do next, but it sits behind a site that's hard to search and hard to skim, so unless you already knew what you were looking for you probably weren't going to find it.
So I took their open data and built the version I wanted to use, with search that keeps up, risk levels you can read at a glance, and recalls grouped by the categories people actually care about like food, medication, vehicles and products for children. Every recall links back to Health Canada's official page, since they remain the source of record and this was never meant to replace them.
How it's built, and why it's free
The setup is deliberately simple. A scheduled job pulls the latest recall data from Health Canada's open data API and commits it into the site as static files. There's no backend and no database, so there's very little to pay for and very little that can break overnight.
That keeps the running cost down to roughly the price of the domain each year, which is why the site can stay free, with no ads and nothing to sell you.
What that gets you:
- Search that returns results as you type
- Recalls sorted by product type, risk level and date
- A direct link to Health Canada's official page for every recall
- No ads, no accounts and no newsletter pop-ups
What this site isn't
It isn't official. The site is run independently and has no affiliation with Health Canada or the Government of Canada.
It's also one person's side project, so it can be wrong. Data sometimes arrives late, Health Canada's API goes down more often than I'd like, and I don't catch everything. For anything that affects your health or safety, please confirm it at the source: Health Canada Recalls and Safety Alerts
Common questions
How often is it updated?
Daily at 2:15 AM Eastern, shortly after Health Canada refreshes their public API.
That's the intention at least. Their API has become unreliable and access breaks fairly often, and I've asked them several times for a more stable connection to the open data. Until that's resolved I sometimes update it by hand, which can cause a delay.
Why do details send me to Health Canada's site?
Their public API doesn't include anything beyond what you see here. If you'd like the full details on this site, the most useful thing you can do is ask Health Canada to expand what their API returns.
Is this a replacement for Health Canada's recall site?
No, and it shouldn't be treated as one. Theirs is the official record, and I've only tried to make it easier to search and quicker to read.
What's next?
I'd like to help people find safer alternatives to recalled products, and make it clearer which companies have recurring quality problems.
I also plan to open source the project so other people can improve it. I work on this in my spare time, so progress tends to come in bursts.
Supporting the project
If the site has been useful and you'd like to help cover the domain bill, you can buy me a coffee
Getting in touch
The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. Corrections, bug reports and blunt feedback are all welcome.