Holy crap this is a huge deal! FDA made Establishment inspection numbers public!
THATS ***** HUGE
That means that you can now make sure that importers have actually registered with fda and are the entities they claim they are. It ALSO means that if they are selling you something like an acidified or low acid food and you want to make sure they registered as such, you can confirm via the number.
FYI, database appears accurate so far, my firm popped up immediately and had all old recalls listed and sorted by class and year
The FEI number appearing on the database isn't the same as the FDA registration number so it's not a slam dunk tool for confirming whether a facility is registered with the FDA. Some of my suppliers show up as "not found" on the database, which I presume means that they have not been issued an FEI number (which I presume, in turn, is because they haven't been inspected). Doesn't mean they're not properly registered, however.
This new tool will be a huge time saver. In the past we have had to access each of the FDA databases (for recalls, for import refusals, for inspection classifications, etc) individually and entering each supplier on each database. A huge pain!. With this new tool it means 1 stop shopping, and only typing a supplier name once.
I appreciate the warning in another post that recall data may not be complete.