Beef Import Safety Checker

Scan a package photo

Take or upload a photo of the label. This runs text recognition entirely in your browser — the photo is never uploaded anywhere — and looks for a country-of-origin claim, a USDA establishment ("EST.") number, and any brand name that matches our USDA refusal/recall data.

Best shot to take: the USDA inspection legend (the small circular/oval mark that reads "U.S. INSPECTED AND PASSED..." with an "EST." number) is usually printed on the back of the package near the nutrition facts panel — not the front. If a front-of-pack photo doesn't turn up an EST number, try the back too. A straight-on, well-lit, close-up shot of the small print works best; blurry or angled photos will OCR poorly.

Raw extracted text (for checking OCR accuracy)

Look up a country, establishment number, or product

Easiest way to search: the EST number. It's usually the fastest thing to actually find on a package — just a few digits inside the small USDA inspection mark (look for "EST." followed by a number, e.g. 93), typically on the back near the nutrition facts panel. Since it's an exact code rather than a name, it matches precisely — no guessing how a country or company name is spelled or formatted in USDA's data.

You can also search by country name (e.g. Brazil) or plant name (e.g. Cargill) if that's what you have. This searches every beef establishment USDA has logged shipping to a US port since FY2025 — refused and clean — plus live FSIS recalls and USDA's separate directory of domestic (non-import) US plants, so a US establishment number tells you where in the US it is, not just that it isn't foreign.

Beef import refusal rates by country of origin

Every beef lot presented for entry at a US port must pass FSIS reinspection. This table shows, per country, how many beef lots were presented vs. refused (for any reason — shipping damage, paperwork, or lab findings) in the current dataset. A high refusal rate is not proof of unsafe meat; it's a transparency signal worth knowing before assuming all imported beef is treated identically.

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Residue & chloramphenicol watch

Important limitation, stated plainly: FSIS's public shipment-level refusal data does not name the specific chemical found in a rejected lot. Refusals tied to chemical or drug residues are lumped into one public category, “Failed Laboratory Analyses”, alongside pathogen findings. There is no public, real-time, per-shipment feed of "this lot tested positive for chloramphenicol." Anyone who tells you otherwise is overstating what the data supports.

What we can show you

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Documented chloramphenicol incidents (curated, not live)

August 2026 — China rejects Argentine beef shipment. Chinese customs inspectors refused a 22-ton shipment of Argentine beef after detecting chloramphenicol, an antibiotic with zero legal tolerance in food-producing animals under both Chinese and US standards. This shipment was bound for China, not the US, but it's the clearest recent evidence that chloramphenicol contamination is an active risk in South American beef supply chains that also export to the US under the 2026 tariff-free import expansion.

Source: news reporting, Aug 2026 (see chat citations). Not an FSIS record.

Where to find real per-compound residue data

FSIS's National Residue Program publishes an annual report that does break down confirmed violations by specific compound (including chloramphenicol) and by country — just not at shipment-level granularity, and not in real time. If you want to check historical rates of chloramphenicol or other banned-drug violations by exporting country, that report is the authoritative source:

FSIS National Residue Program directive & reports ↗

Recent beef recalls (live FSIS data)

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What this tool actually does

✅ What's real and live

FSIS's public Recall & Public Health Alert API — fetched live, every time you load this page.
FSIS's official "Import Presented & Refused" and "Import Refusal Reason" datasets — lot-level records of every meat shipment refused entry at a US port, published monthly by USDA.
Country-level refusal-rate statistics computed directly from that USDA data.
The "Scan a Package" photo reader — runs a real OCR (optical character recognition) engine entirely in your browser to pull text off a label photo, then matches whatever it finds against the data above.
USDA's domestic Meat, Poultry & Egg Product Inspection (MPI) Directory — a completely separate dataset from the import data, covering ~3,000 US beef establishments with their real address (city, state, county). This is what lets a search tell you a plant is domestic, and where it is, instead of just failing to find it in the import records.

❌ What it can't do

It cannot test a specific package of meat in your fridge for contamination — that requires a lab.
It cannot tell you the specific chemical behind a "Failed Laboratory Analyses" refusal — USDA doesn't publish that per-shipment.
It cannot verify "Product of USA" label claims — repackaging loopholes mean a US-labeled product can legally contain imported meat. The USDA establishment (EST) number on the package tells you the domestic processing plant, not necessarily the country the animal came from.
The photo scanner cannot verify a label is genuine or accurate — it only reads printed text and reports what it found. OCR also makes mistakes (glare, curved packaging, small print, stylized fonts), so always sanity-check a scan result against the raw extracted text shown after each scan.

How to read the inspection mark

Look for the USDA circular inspection legend on the package. The number after "EST." is the establishment number of the plant that last processed/packed the product in the US — search it above, or scan a photo of it, to see if that plant shows up in any refusal or recall record. This mark is usually on the back of the package, near the nutrition facts panel, not the front.

Data sources

Support this project

This site is free to use and always will be — no ads, no paywall, no account required. If it's useful to you, sponsoring it on GitHub helps cover the time spent keeping the USDA data current and the tool itself running.