What is Safety Gate and how do I follow notifications in my product category?

Safety Gate shows which products have been reported as dangerous in the EU

Safety Gate is the European alert system in which the supervisory authorities of the 27 Member States publish weekly which non-food products have been recalled, withdrawn from the market or otherwise restricted because they pose a risk to consumers. You can monitor it by searching the public overview on the Safety Gate website for your own product category, or by consulting the weekly open data publication — this is different from reporting an incident yourself, which goes through the Safety Business Gateway and reaches the national supervisory authority (in the Netherlands the NVWA, in Germany the state authorities with the BAuA as coordination point, in Belgium the Economic Inspection of the SPF Economy).

The reason to monitor Safety Gate systematically depends on your role in the supply chain. For a manufacturer — and this also includes the online retailer that sells products under its own name or brand, or that substantially modifies a purchased product, even if only a logo is added — a report in your own category directly feeds into the risk analysis and technical documentation: a similar product recalled elsewhere is a signal that cannot be ignored. For an importer it is the same, because that party is responsible for what enters the EU. A distributor carries this burden more lightly: it does not carry out its own risk analysis and does not maintain technical documentation, but still has an interest in the overview to see whether a product already on the shelf has meanwhile been marked as dangerous.

Where this is stated in the regulation: Article 25

Article 25 of Regulation (EU) 2023/988 governs the Safety Gate system itself: the reporting obligation of the Member States and the public accessibility of those reports. The weekly publication and the open data are the practical implementation of that, and are freely accessible without requiring an account or incurring any costs.