Swiss Food Safety MCP Server

🇨🇭 Part of the Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio

swiss-food-safety-mcp

🌐 English | Deutsch

MCP server connecting AI models to Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (BLV) open data — food recalls, animal disease surveillance, food control results, antibiotic usage, children's nutrition surveys and the pesticide register. No authentication required.

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Overview

swiss-food-safety-mcp gives AI assistants like Claude direct access to official Swiss food safety and veterinary data from the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (BLV / Bundesamt für Lebensmittelsicherheit und Veterinärwesen). It provides 11 tools covering food recalls, animal disease surveillance, food control results, antibiotic usage in veterinary medicine, nutrition surveys for children, and the pesticide register.

All data comes from official Swiss federal sources (opendata.swiss, lindas.admin.ch, news.admin.ch). No API keys or authentication are required.

This server follows the No-Auth-First philosophy and is part of a Swiss public sector MCP portfolio.

Anchor demo query: "Are there any current BLV food warnings relevant to Zurich school canteens — and which notifiable animal diseases are currently reported in the canton?"

Demo

→ More use cases by audience →

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Features

• 🚨 Public warnings & recalls — Live RSS feed of BLV product recalls and health warnings
• 🐄 Animal disease surveillance — Notifiable animal diseases since 1991 (InfoSM) via SPARQL + CSV
• 🐦 Avian influenza monitoring — Wild bird surveillance data with geodata
• 🥩 Food control results — Cantonal food inspection results and violation rates
• 💊 Antibiotic usage veterinary — ISABV data on antibiotic use in animal medicine
• 🧒 Children's nutrition survey — menuCH-Kids national nutritional survey data
• 🌿 Pesticide register — Swiss approved pesticide products and active ingredients
• 📊 Dataset discovery — Browse all 28 BLV datasets on opendata.swiss via CKAN API
• 🔗 Dual transport — stdio (Claude Desktop) + Streamable HTTP (cloud/Render.com)
• 🗣️ Bilingual — English-first documentation, German secondary

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Prerequisites

• Python 3.11+
• uv or uvx (recommended) — install uv

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Installation

Using uvx (recommended — no install needed)

uvx swiss-food-safety-mcp

Using uv

uv tool install swiss-food-safety-mcp
swiss-food-safety-mcp

From source

git clone https://github.com/malkreide/swiss-food-safety-mcp
cd swiss-food-safety-mcp
uv sync
uv run swiss-food-safety-mcp

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Quickstart

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "swiss-food-safety": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["swiss-food-safety-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Try it immediately in Claude Desktop:

"Which BLV food warnings are currently active?"
"Are there any notifiable animal diseases reported in Zurich canton this year?"

Other MCP Clients (Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code + Continue)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "swiss-food-safety": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["swiss-food-safety-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cloud Deployment (Streamable HTTP)

For use via claude.ai in the browser (e.g. on managed workstations without local software):

# Loopback only (default) — safe for local testing:
swiss-food-safety-mcp --http
# Server runs on 127.0.0.1:8002

# External exposure (e.g. behind the Render TLS proxy):
swiss-food-safety-mcp --http --host 0.0.0.0

⚠️ The HTTP transport binds to 127.0.0.1 by default. Pass --host 0.0.0.0 only when external exposure is intended. Set BLV_MCP_ALLOWED_ORIGINS (comma-separated, no wildcard) to permit browser clients; it defaults to https://claude.ai.

Render.com (recommended):

1. Push/fork the repository to GitHub
2. On render.com: New Web Service → connect GitHub repo
3. Set the start command to: swiss-food-safety-mcp --http --host 0.0.0.0
4. In claude.ai under Settings → MCP Servers, add: https://your-app.onrender.com/mcp

Docker:

docker build -t swiss-food-safety-mcp .
docker run -p 8002:8002 swiss-food-safety-mcp
# or, with explicit CPU/memory limits:
docker compose up

The image is a non-root, multi-stage build; the container already binds 0.0.0.0 and includes a healthcheck. docker-compose.yml additionally caps CPU and memory.

💡 "stdio for the developer laptop, Streamable HTTP for the browser."

🔧 Configuration — every runtime setting is overridable via BLV_MCP_* environment variables (BLV_MCP_HTTP_HOST, BLV_MCP_HTTP_PORT, BLV_MCP_ALLOWED_ORIGINS, BLV_MCP_TIMEOUT, BLV_MCP_OTEL_ENDPOINT, …). Outbound requests are restricted to Swiss federal hosts (*.admin.ch, opendata.swiss). Optional OpenTelemetry tracing: install with pip install swiss-food-safety-mcp[otel] and set BLV_MCP_OTEL_ENDPOINT.

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Available Tools

Example Queries

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Architecture

┌─────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────────────────┐     ┌──────────────────────────────┐
│   Claude / AI   │────▶│   Swiss Food Safety MCP     │────▶│  Swiss Federal Open Data     │
│   (MCP Host)    │◀────│   (MCP Server)              │◀────│                              │
└─────────────────┘     │                             │     │  opendata.swiss (CKAN/CSV)   │
                        │  11 Tools · No Auth         │     │  lindas.admin.ch (SPARQL)    │
                        │  Stdio | Streamable HTTP    │     │  news.admin.ch (RSS/XML)     │
                        └─────────────────────────────┘     └──────────────────────────────┘

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Synergies with Related MCP Servers

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Project Structure

swiss-food-safety-mcp/
├── src/
│   └── swiss_food_safety_mcp/
│       ├── __init__.py        # Package metadata
│       └── server.py          # All tools, resources, prompts
├── tests/
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── test_server.py         # Unit tests (no live API calls)
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/
│       └── ci.yml             # Python 3.11–3.13 matrix
├── pyproject.toml             # hatchling build, uv-compatible
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── CONTRIBUTING.md            # Contribution guide (English)
├── CONTRIBUTING.de.md        # Contribution guide (German)
├── SECURITY.md               # Security policy (English)
├── SECURITY.de.md            # Security policy (German)
├── LICENSE                    # MIT
├── README.md                  # This file (English)
└── README.de.md               # German version

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Data Sources

All data is open government data (OGD) under Creative Commons with attribution requirement.

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Known Limitations

• SPARQL endpoint: Automatic fallback to CSV if the lindas.admin.ch SPARQL endpoint is unavailable
• RSS feed: Limited to the most recent BLV publications; no historical archive
• Pesticide register: XML parsing may be slow for queries returning large result sets
• CKAN datasets: Opendata.swiss rate limits apply under heavy usage
• Animal disease data: Canton-level filtering depends on data completeness in the source

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Safety & Limits

• Read-only: All tools perform HTTP GET requests only — no data is written, modified, or deleted.
• No personal data: The APIs return aggregated public health and food safety statistics. No personally identifiable information is processed or stored by this server.
• Rate limits: opendata.swiss CKAN and lindas.admin.ch SPARQL are public APIs; use limit and filtering parameters conservatively. The server enforces a 30-second timeout per request.
• Data freshness: RSS warnings reflect the latest BLV publications at query time. Statistical datasets (animal diseases, food control, antibiotics) are updated periodically by the BLV. No caching is performed by this server.
• Terms of service: Data is subject to the ToS of each source — opendata.swiss, lindas.admin.ch, news.admin.ch. BLV data is published under Creative Commons with attribution.
• No guarantees: This server is a community project, not affiliated with the BLV or the Swiss federal administration. Availability depends on upstream APIs.

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Deployment & Scaling

This server is Phase 1 — read-only (see ROADMAP.md): all 11 tools are read-only queries with no write surface.

Run it as a single instance. The Streamable HTTP transport keeps per-session state, so horizontal scaling would require Mcp-Session-Id sticky routing at the load balancer plus a shared session store — neither is implemented, by design, for a server of this scope. A single Render instance (or one container) is the supported deployment; docker-compose.yml sets explicit CPU/memory limits for self-hosting.

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Testing

# Unit tests (no API access required)
PYTHONPATH=src pytest tests/ -m "not live"

# All tests including live API checks
PYTHONPATH=src pytest tests/

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Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

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Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

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Security

See SECURITY.md for the security policy and how to report a vulnerability.

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License

MIT License — see LICENSE

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Author

Hayal Oezkan · github.com/malkreide

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Credits & Related Projects

• Data: opendata.swiss / BLV – Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (BLV)
• Protocol: Model Context Protocol – Anthropic / Linux Foundation
• Related: zurich-opendata-mcp – MCP server for Zurich city open data
• Portfolio: Swiss Public Data MCP Portfolio