Recall notice: two remedies for the consumer to choose from, and the words you may not use

Firms that have others manufacture for them and sell under their own brand — the model whole Italian districts live on, from housewares to nursery goods to sporting equipment — decided years ago not to keep a list of who buys: the customer belongs to the retailer, not to the brand. If one of those products is recalled, that decision presents its bill within days, and the bill is not pulling goods off the shelves: it is a remedy owed, one by one, to every consumer holding the item at home.

Whoever puts the brand on it is the manufacturer

Regulation (EU) 2023/988 on general product safety has applied since 13 December 2024; the version consolidated to 29 May 2026 carries one amendment, on emergency procedures. Article 13(1) closes every convenient reading: a person “shall be deemed to be a manufacturer […] and shall be subject to the obligations of the manufacturer set out in Article 9 where that natural or legal person places a product on the market under the natural or legal person’s name or trademark”. The subcontractor who moulds the shell is not the manufacturer: whoever fixes the nameplate is.

A recall does not end when the product comes back

Articles 33 to 37 sit in Chapter VIII, Right to information and to a remedy: the only part of the text that costs money line by line. Article 37(1) requires the operator to offer the consumer “an effective, cost-free and timely remedy”. Article 37(2) spells out what that means: offering “the choice between at least two” of repair, replacement “with a safe one of the same type and at least the same value and quality”, and a refund whose amount “shall be at least equal to the price paid by the consumer”. Only one remedy is allowed where the others would be impossible or disproportionately costly, weighing the inconvenience to the consumer as well as your own. Article 37(5) removes the last way out: “The consumer shall not bear the costs of shipping or otherwise returning the product”, and for non-portable products the operator arranges collection.

This is where it parts company with Regulation (EU) 2023/1230, which we covered on instruction manuals. The two instruments define a recall in almost identical words, but the word refund does not appear once in the text of Regulation (EU) 2023/1230: the machinery regulation tells the manufacturer what to do — bring into conformity, withdraw, recall — and never tells the buyer what he gets. There, a professional user already on your files; here, a consumer you may not know you have.

The notice has a mandatory headline and five banned expressions

Article 36(2) lists what the notice must contain, in the language of the member state of marketing. The headline is not yours to write: it must consist of the words “Product safety recall”. You need a picture, the name and brand; batch or serial numbers and a drawing of where to find them; “an instruction to immediately stop using the recalled product”; the remedies; a free phone number.

Point (c) wrecks drafts written by marketing: the description of the hazard must avoid “any elements that may decrease consumers’ perception of risk”, and it then names five expressions one by one — “voluntary”, “precautionary”, “discretionary”, “in rare situations”, “in specific situations” — plus a ban on stating that no accidents have been reported. The voluntary and precautionary recall of the standard Italian press release is, on the text, a non-compliant notice. The template sits in the annex to Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1435 of 24 May 2024.

The customer list stops being a marketing choice

Article 35(1) requires that “all affected consumers that can be identified are notified directly and without undue delay”, and that operators who collect their customers’ personal data “shall make use of that information for recalls and safety warnings”: the promotions database becomes a mandatory safety instrument. Where that is not enough, Article 35(4) requires a “clear and visible recall notice” across the website, social media, newsletters, retail outlets and mass media. And anyone selling through a marketplace has a channel that starts without them: Article 22(12) obliges the online marketplace to inform its own buyers and to publish the recall on its interface.

The Italian layer, which landed in May

Legislative Decree 78 of 8 April 2026 (Official Gazette no. 111 of 15 May 2026, in force from 16 May) rewrites Part IV, Title I of the Italian Consumer Code. The new Article 104(3) adds what the regulation leaves to member states: operators must ensure that any recall notices and the related consumer information services are in the Italian language. The free phone line answers in Italian.

The new Article 112 sets the penalties. Placing dangerous products on the market is punished by detention from six months to one year and a fine of EUR 10,000 to EUR 100,000, increased by up to half where the risk is serious: this is criminal law, not administrative. Breaching the obligations in Chapter III of the regulation costs EUR 2,500 to EUR 25,000; failing to comply with an authority’s order, EUR 3,000 to EUR 30,000. And under paragraph 6, the penalties are imposed by the territorially competent chamber of commerce, industry, craft trades and agriculture.

It is worth counting the sets. Chapter III is Articles 9 to 21; Articles 35, 36 and 37 sit in Chapter VIII, and that penalty, on its face, does not name them. The other route remains: the consumer complains that the remedy is unsatisfactory, the authority orders, and non-compliance is again a fine. And Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/2958 requires member states, by 22 December 2026 and annually, to report the number of those complaints and the “Number and value of penalties imposed per type of infringement”.

Why a closed system

A recall is prepared on three things that cannot leave the company: the register of who bought, the batches still in circulation, and a defect that is not yet public. Sending that set to an external model means handing a third party an unannounced recall and an archive of consumers — while Article 35(2) itself requires those contact details to be “limited to the necessary minimum” and used only for safety. That is a purpose limitation a metered service does not honour.

Then there is the text. The notice is a regulated act: one wrong word makes it non-compliant, and from a model you cannot inspect you cannot demonstrate which version wrote it, nor that the check on banned expressions actually ran. A recall runs for months, in waves: if the model changes underneath you, the second wave speaks a different language from the first. And the model that learns which batches generate complaints is the map of your supply chain: trained outside, it stays with whoever hosts it.

What we do not know

We do not give legal advice on how an individual operator is classified, nor on the penalty coverage of Articles 35, 36 and 37 in Italy: we have read Article 112 and counted the sets, not the case law interpreting it. We do not know whether the Commission will use Article 35(3) to require product registration for specific categories: no act appears on that point. The link between industrial districts and own-brand selling is a recurring pattern, stated as such.

The two axes, applied

Complying. Article 36 becomes a control that runs over the draft notice before it goes out: exact headline, mandatory fields, banned expressions blocked, Italian for notice and information service. Plus a dated register of who was notified, when, which remedy was offered and which was accepted — the trail the chamber of commerce will ask for, not an opinion that ends in a file.

Deciding. The same system holds production, shipments, after-sales, e-commerce and marketplaces in a single operating model, on which AI agents carry out decisions with an operator in command: which batches are still out, who is genuinely reachable, when replacing beats repairing. For large manufacturing firms, defence, public administration and healthcare, in two modes: on premises on self-contained machines, or a dedicated cloud with data centres in Italy, always with shared administration.

The first session, at no cost, produces one concrete thing: how many of your buyers from the past two years you could actually reach tomorrow morning, and out of which systems. Talk it over with one of our engineers.