The Food and Drug Administration has to recall hundreds of foods every year. Like cookie snack packs with chunks of blue plastic hiding inside, Salmonella-tainted taco seasoning or curry powder laced with lead. It can take months before a recall is issued. But now researchers have come up with a method that might fast-track that process, leading to early detection and, ultimately, faster recalls. The system relies on the fact that people increasingly buy foods and spices online.

A new program can track all recalled foods based from Amazon customer reviews. Called BERT, the AI program identified thousands of recalled products with an accuracy rate of 74 percent. Researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program that can detect unsafe food contaminated with chemicals, toxins, pathogens, and those which are mislabeled of allergens. Many people experience illness resulting from the consumption of unsafe food items, which is now considered a global health problem. Because of this, the researchers developed a machine learning approach to help detect reports of unsafe food items from Amazon, a multinational technology company and the world's largest online retailer.