Guide

Product recalls in Germany: who does what

Germany’s recall system mirrors its federal structure: the testing and enforcement work happens in the sixteen Länder (federal states), while federal bodies coordinate and publish. For a consumer, that means knowing three portals.

Food: lebensmittelwarnung.de

Food, cosmetics, certain everyday consumer items (Bedarfsgegenstände — e.g. tableware, textiles, jewellery) and tattoo-ink recalls and warnings are published on lebensmittelwarnung.de, a joint portal of the federal states and the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL). Notices state the product, batch or best-before date, the reason, and the affected federal states — a recall may apply in Bavaria but not Hamburg, depending on where the product was distributed.

Non-food products: Safety Gate and the manufacturer

Dangerous non-food products found in Germany are notified into the EU’s Safety Gate system, which makes them visible across all member states. Recalls themselves are typically run by the manufacturer or importer under EU product-safety law (the General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988, complemented by Germany’s Product Safety Act), with the Länder market-surveillance authorities supervising.

Vehicles: the KBA

The Federal Motor Transport Authority (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, KBA) oversees vehicle recalls and maintains a public recall database; for safety-critical defects it can order recalls and, for vehicles that are never fixed, notify the local registration authorities, which can ban the vehicle from the road. Owners are contacted directly using central vehicle-register data — German vehicle recalls are hard to ignore.

What this means in practice

If you shop in Germany: check lebensmittelwarnung.de for food, the KBA database for your car, and Safety Gate for everything else — or browse our German recall index, which aggregates records from these sources with links back to each official notice.