I Built a Canada Product Recalls & Safety Alerts Scraper That Reads Open Government Data

I Built a Canada Product Recalls & Safety Alerts Scraper That Reads Open Government Data

Every few weeks another consumer product gets recalled — a battery that overheats, a fan that catches fire, a vehicle part that fails. For compliance teams, importers and retailers, staying on top of those announcements is a job in itself. Canada publishes every recall on a government website, but the site has no JSON API and no RSS feed. It is plain HTML, served by Drupal.

So I built an Apify actor that reads it directly — no API key, no login, no proxy budget.

The niche, and why build our own

The product-recall scraper niche on Apify is small but telling. The reference implementation that dominates it is dromb/canada-recalls-safety-alerts — a reliable, well-shaped actor that turns Health Canada's recall database into clean JSON. When I looked at the niche, that actor was the reliability benchmark. It worked, it had a sensible schema, and it had traction.