V i s u a l / R A S F F

About

RASFF is the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, the centralized system for reporting food-related safety issues withing the European Union. Currently mamanged by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), it provides open access to the data, as well as the possibility to filter and export notifications through a dedicated Portal. The EFSA itself regularly publishes reports detailing the contributions of European Countries to the notification system (that is how many notifications are issued by each EU country in Country Fact Sheets) and a yearly report.

Despite its overall usefulness, these tools have shortcomings, namely:

  • the most interesting data (country of origin, specific nature of the alert, products affected), are buried within non-formatted, highly variable text, making the data difficult to analyze
  • as a result of the previous point, no analysis on the nature and causes of alerts is available, making it challenging to identify recurring issues
  • even in the RASFF yearly report, data is presented in the form of tables, with little aid towards an efficient visualization of the information

This projects seeks to address the above points by providing a more compelling, interactive visualization of RASFF notifications, backed by a completely re-formatted set of data. The project is ongoing and will possibly see new additions and improvements as time (and budget) allow.

How to use the data

When analysing the data one should keep in mind that the reported numbers are based on the raw number of notifications for products originating from a certain country, a value which is highly correlated with macro-economic indicators. In practice, this means that a higher number of notifications could merely reflect higher trade volumes, and should not necessarily be associated with a higher density of non-conformities. Any comparative analysis should therefore be approached with the utmost care.

On the other hand, one can still use RASFF data to gain useful insight and meaningful trends e.g.

  • identify hot-spots of certain contaminants
  • follow trends in contaminants over time
  • analyze trends in notifications after the introduction of new legislation
  • use RASFF notifications as indirect indicators of import/export trends (with care, see above)
  • highlight anomalous spikes in notifications
  • ...

Disclaimer

All data are property of their respective owners and can be accessed in their original form through the RASFF Portal.
Visual/RASFF is a personal project with no outside support of any kind. The project is made available under the GNU AGPL V3 License.