FDA Import Alert Screening

The problem

FDA can detain a shipment without physically examining it — or exempt one — based on which of its published Import Alerts a firm, product or country appears on. Each alert publishes its own lists — in FDA's words, the Red List for those that "have met the criteria for Detention without Physical Examination", the Yellow List for those "subject to intensified surveillance", and the Green List for those that "have met criteria for exemption". FDA's search looks a firm up one name at a time; screening a whole supplier list, and re-checking it every time an alert changes, is the repetitive part.

Who it's for

Import-compliance teams, customs brokers, and food, drug, device and cosmetic importers who need to know a supplier's FDA Import Alert exposure before goods ship — plus logistics and trade software builders embedding that check into their own tools.

Use cases

• Vetting a new supplier's FDA Import Alert exposure before placing a purchase order
• Batch screening a supplier list during onboarding or a periodic compliance review
• Checking whether a firm sits on a Green List exemption for a specific alert
• Embedding FDA Import Alert screening into a customs brokerage or logistics platform

What it does

Send a firm name and get back every FDA Import Alert list it is a potential match on: the alert number and name, which list it appears on (Red, Yellow or Green), and the firm-level detail FDA published — address, country, product code and description, notes, and date_published, the date FDA prints beside the firm's name in that alert's list (the entry's date, not the alert's). When FDA lists more than one product for a firm, its product codes, descriptions and notes each come back as one text joined with "; ", so which code goes with which description is not recorded. Country and product description are optional: each match says whether they agree (country_match, product_match), and they never remove a match. There is no address input; firm.address is returned so you can compare it with your supplier's address by eye. An FEI number is carried through for your own records. A batch endpoint screens up to 50 firms in one call. It screens firm names. Some alerts cover every shipment of a product from an entire country unless the firm is on that alert's Green List; those are not assessed, and every response says so, with FDA's alert list to check. A listed entry the screen read and scored below its match floor is not shown, but it is counted in records_below_match_threshold, so a no_match beside a non-zero count is not a statement that nothing resembled the name — a short trading name can score below the floor against a longer listed name. It screens organizations, not individuals: an entry is treated as an organization when its name carries a legal form or a trade word. An FDA entry whose listed name may identify a person is never returned; when one would have matched, the response sets withheld_possible_individual and incomplete_coverage to true and says so in coverage_note, so a hidden entry is never reported as a clean result.

Why Aervik's implementation is different

Every response tells you what it was built from. The source block carries basis (live FDA data or a clearly-labeled fixture dataset), as_of (the date of the data actually served), and a note naming the refresh cycle that produced it — so you never have to guess whether a result reflects current FDA data. An API that cannot tell you how current its data is cannot tell you anything useful about a detention risk. And every match carries its own evidence: match_type (exact or fuzzy), a similarity score, whether the country you supplied agreed, and FDA's entry for the firm the match was made against. That is enough for a reviewer to judge the match rather than trust it, which is the point — a name-similarity result a human cannot audit is worse than no result.

Example

Request

POST /screen
{
  "firm_name": "Barbosa & Marques S.A.",
  "country": "BRAZIL"
}

Response

Captured live 2026-09-18 from the request above, values unedited. The cache generation and `source.as_of` advance with each refresh cycle, so a call on a later day reports a later one — this is a dated recording, not a promise about today.

{
  "input": {
    "firm_name": "Barbosa & Marques S.A.",
    "country": "BRAZIL"
  },
  "status": "match",
  "matches": [
    {
      "alert_number": "12-10",
      "alert_name": "Detention Without Physical Examination of Cheese Due to Microbiological Contamination",
      "list_type": "red",
      "matched_name": "Barbosa & Marques S.A.",
      "match_type": "exact",
      "score": 1,
      "country_match": true,
      "product_match": null,
      "firm": {
        "name": "Barbosa & Marques S.A.",
        "address": "Rua Aluizio Esteves, 250 Lourdes , Governado Valadares, Minas Gerais, BRAZIL",
        "country": "BRAZIL",
        "fei_number": null,
        "product_code": "12 Y - - 99",
        "product_description": "Cheese And Cheese Products, Not Elsewhere Mentioned, N.E.C.",
        "notes": "Desc: Queijo Minas Cheese; Notes: DWPE date - 6/25/2004 Queijo Minas Cheese only.",
        "date_published": "2009-09-18"
      }
    }
  ],
  "incomplete_coverage": false,
  "withheld_possible_individual": false,
  "coverage_note": null,
  "records_below_match_threshold": 0,
  "source": {
    "name": "FDA Import Alerts (Red/Yellow/Green Lists)",
    "url": "https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/ialist.html",
    "basis": "live",
    "as_of": "2026-09-17",
    "note": "Served from a D1 cache of real FDA Import Alert data, generation 13, read from FDA in a refresh cycle that began 2026-09-17 (24051 firm entries across 153 alerts). The cache is refreshed by a scheduled job inside FDA's own published visiting-hours window, never on a customer request. A full cycle across every alert spans several runs; a newer cycle may be staging in the background without affecting this response."
  },
  "disclaimer": "Advisory only. A \"match\" or \"possible_match\" result is a deterministic name-similarity classification against FDA's published Import Alert Red/Yellow/Green List data -- it is a potential match requiring independent verification, never a confirmed determination that the firm you screened is the firm on FDA's list. Conversely, a \"no_match\" result is not a guarantee that a firm or shipment is free of exposure under any FDA Import Alert: coverage may reflect a fixture dataset rather than live FDA data (check source.basis and source.as_of before relying on any result), and this Service does not cover every FDA Import Alert or program that may apply. Countrywide Import Alerts: NOT ASSESSED. Some FDA Import Alerts detain every shipment of a product from an entire country (some only in a stated season) unless the firm is on that alert's Green List, so a firm can be covered without its name appearing on any list. This Service screens firm names only and cannot tell you whether such an alert covers your supplier's country and product: check the alerts for that country at https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cms_ia/ialist.html before relying on a no_match. This is not a customs-business determination or legal/customs/regulatory advice of any kind. See GET /terms for the full disclosure."
}

Key features

• One call covers the firm lists of every published FDA Import Alert — Red, Yellow and Green
• Says what it cannot see: alerts covering an entire country are declared NOT ASSESSED on every response
• Organizations only: an entry that may name an individual is withheld, and the response is marked incomplete, not clean
• Near misses are counted: an entry read and scored below the match floor is reported, never silently dropped
• Green List coverage, so an exemption is visible and not just a detention risk
• Per-match evidence: match type, score, country agreement, and FDA's entry for the firm
• Per-response freshness manifest — basis, as_of, and the ingest that produced it
• Batch endpoint for supplier lists, up to 50 firms per call
• Advisory-only disclosure carried in full on every response, not buried in terms

Pricing

A free tier with 30 API requests a month to build against, then monthly plans from $29 with a set number of requests included. The $29 and $99 plans are hard-capped — calls stop at the limit rather than billing you; only the top plan (10,000 requests) runs on a soft limit, with overage at $0.15 per additional request. Batching is cheap: one call screening up to 50 firms counts as a single request, so the same plan covers occasional supplier checks and high-volume brokerage workflows.

See exact current pricing tiers on RapidAPI →