FDA food facility registration

What the law exempts

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act shields the food facility registration list from the Freedom of Information Act. 21 U.S.C. §350d(a)(5) states that the Secretary ‘shall compile and maintain an up-to-date list of facilities that are registered under this section,’ and that ‘[s]uch list and any registration documents submitted pursuant to this subsection shall not be subject to disclosure under section 552 of title 5’ — nor is ‘[i]nformation derived from such list or registration documents … to the extent that it discloses the identity or location of a specific registered person.’ The implementing regulation, 21 CFR 1.243(a), restates the same exemption for ‘[t]he list of registered facilities and registration documents.’

The exemption is not absolute. 21 CFR 1.243(b) provides that paragraph (a) ‘does not apply to any information obtained by other means or that has previously been disclosed to the public as defined in § 20.81 of this chapter’ — and 21 CFR 20.81(a) defines that carve-out as information ‘previously disclosed in a lawful manner to any member of the public, other than an employee or consultant or pursuant to other commercial arrangements with appropriate safeguards for secrecy.’ In practice, this narrows the exemption only for information that is already legitimately public through some other channel — it does not create a general right to search FDA's registration list.

FDA's own position

FDA addressed this directly in a 20 July 2026 constituent update warning facilities against sharing their registration credentials with third-party platforms: ‘FFR information is not public.’ The same page distinguishes the FEI number: it is ‘a separate, unique public identifier that can be looked up via [the] FEI Search Portal’ — but looking up an FEI confirms an identifier and an address match, not a facility's current registration status.

Not every FDA registry works this way

FDA's food facility list is the exception, not the rule, among FDA registries. FDA publishes the Drug Establishments Current Registration Site (DECRS), described on fda.gov as ‘a publication of currently registered establishments which manufacture, prepare, propagate, compound or process drugs that are distributed in the U.S. or marketed for import to the U.S.’ Medical device establishment registration and device listing are searchable without a login through FDA's own database, which states that ‘[r]egistration of a device establishment … does not in any way denote approval … by FDA’ — and the same dataset is also published as an open, monthly-updated API (openFDA). Food facility registration has no equivalent public lookup.

What this does not mean

This does not mean no legitimate channel to confirm registration exists at all — only that a direct, no-login public search of FDA's own list is not one of them, on the sources checked here. Any claim beyond the legal exemption itself — that a support line verifies third-party requests, that the FEI portal shows registration status, or that a paid ‘verification certificate’ sold by a private agent carries FDA's endorsement — has not been confirmed against an FDA primary source and is not asserted here.