Why this exists
A close family friend of ours has a peanut allergy. The serious kind, the kind where an adrenaline injector lives in her handbag and eating anything she has not made herself involves a conversation with the kitchen first. She has been doing this her whole life. She is careful in a way most of us never have to be.
One evening she was at ours for dinner. There was a jar in the cupboard, something we had bought a few weeks earlier, and it was going into the sauce. She did what she always does and read the label. Nothing listed. No warning, no may contain, nothing.
That product had been recalled eleven days earlier for undeclared peanut.
We found out later that night, on a phone, scrolling. The notice had been sitting on the Food Standards Australia New Zealand website the whole time, published properly, exactly as the system is meant to work. It had simply never reached the two people in that kitchen who needed it.
Nothing happened to her that night. We got lucky, and it is worth saying plainly that luck is what it was. But the thing that stayed with us was not the near miss. It was how ordinary the failure had been. Nobody did anything wrong. The recall was issued, the label was read, the shelf was checked. And the information still did not travel the last few metres to the person holding the jar.
That is the whole problem. Recalls in Australia are published well. They are just published to a website, and websites need you to remember to visit them. Meanwhile the product is already home, already in the pantry, already halfway into dinner.
So we built the missing step. Something that watches the official feed constantly, works out whether a recall actually applies to you, and then sends it to the one place you will definitely see it: a text message on your phone.
It is deliberately unexciting. No feed to scroll, no app to open, no dashboard to check. Most days you hear nothing from us at all. Then one day a product you have in the cupboard gets recalled, and you know about it in minutes instead of eleven days later.
Everything comes from the Food Standards Australia New Zealand recall feed. No aggregated blogs, no social media rumours, no guesses. If FSANZ has not published it, we do not send it.
No app to install, no notification buried in a settings menu, no email sitting unread under receipts. A text arrives on any phone, with or without data, and people actually look at it.
Each alert names the product, the risk and where it was sold, then links to the official notice. Everything you need to check your own cupboard while you are still standing in front of it.
We are an independent service, not part of FSANZ or any government body, and we do not decide what gets recalled. We pass on official notices faster and more personally than a website can. If you have a diagnosed allergy, this sits alongside the advice of your doctor and your own label reading. It does not replace either.
Give them the eleven days back.