FDA's New Supplier Evaluation Data Dashboard

During our recent FDA FSMA compliance inspection, the inspector said that FDA is putting together a searchable database that ties together several sources of information that allows industry to easily search companies/manufacturers when conducting supplier assessments.

He sent me the link today as the resource is now live.

So here it is. 

Click on FSMA Data Search.

I only quickly looked at it, so can't really comment on how good it is, but I like the concept.

Marshall

Informative, Thanks.

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

Inspections database is still useless however, but there's hope:

Inspectional data does not include State contract inspections at this time. State contract inspections will be posted at a later date."

 

Once state inspections are available this will be an amazingly valuable resource.

Update: looking through some previous employers, the recall pulls are incomplete. Either they don't have data prior to 2014 represented in the database, or things get lost with corporate name changes. Perform your own independent search.

No idea how far back the dataset goes, or what criteria they are using for populating the database.

I like that the FDA is putting this stuff out there. Along with the guidance docs for FSMA, they are giving plausible deniability to industry.

LOL

Marshall

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. 

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 Federal Establishment Identification (FEI) number is NOT the facility registration number.  The FEI numbers in many cases were issued long before facility registration became a requirement.  FDA uses the FEI number for tracking inspections and also as the identifier for approval lists to ship to other countries; for instance, our FEI number must go on labels and documentation for seafood products that we ship to Europe or to China.  A plant that has not been inspected by FDA will not have a FEI number, as far as I know, although they may have a facility registration number if they have registered through the FDA's portal.

Nevertheless, this is interesting and useful data.  Thanks to Marshall for sharing the link. 

Thanks for the correction everyone, that was by bad. How many numbers can there be after all? 

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.