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 the LINDAS SPARQL cube
• 🐦 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 questionnaire tallies (answer counts, not nutrient intake)
• 🌿 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

• 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
• Datasets are pinned, not searched: each data tool names its dataset slug and the resource that carries the data (see DATENQUELLEN in server.py). A keyword search takes the first hit and therefore falls back silently onto something plausible — that is how blv_get_animal_health_stats came to return antibiotics data, and how blv_get_food_control_results came to return a code list out of a dataset whose 26 resources include 18 of them. scripts/record_fixtures.py re-measures the pinned pairs on every run; a renamed dataset now fails loudly.
• Children's nutrition is questionnaire tallies, not nutrient intake: the only menuCH-Kids dataset published on opendata.swiss carries answer counts (Geschlecht, Sprachregion, Altersgruppe, Frage, Antwort, Anzahl). The docstring previously promised nutrient intake against dietary recommendations and offered "Energie", "Zucker", "Eisen" as filter examples — those matched nothing and returned an empty list. Adult food-consumption data exists as a separate dataset that this server does not cover.
• The SPARQL-to-CSV fallback is gone. It could never work: the one CSV resource of the fallback dataset is a ZIP file declared as format: CSV. With the endpoint corrected the fallback is also unnecessary — and a fallback that hides a broken query is worse than none.

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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 + contract tests (no network) — this is what CI runs
PYTHONPATH=src pytest tests/ -m "not live"

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

# Re-measure which dataset and resource each tool hits
PYTHONPATH=src python scripts/record_fixtures.py

54 tests — 53 offline, 1 live.

Why the fixtures are recorded rather than written

A hand-written mock encodes its author's assumption and therefore cannot refute it: production code and fixture come from the same head, the same hour, the same reading of the docs. Where both are wrong, both are wrong together — and the suite stays green.

This repo had it in pure form. Every mocked CKAN resource was named "name": "CSV". On opendata.swiss the same field reads Food establishments 2025 or Food establishments codelist administrative measures — and that difference alone decided whether a tool returned inspection results or a code legend. The mocks could not express the distinction, so no test could fail on it.

What is recorded is therefore the selection: for each tool, the pinned dataset slug, the resource that was hit, and that file's header line. The header is the object of the exercise — it separates data from a legend, and it shows whether the BOM and the delimiter were handled. PROVENANCE.md names the source, the date, the selection rule and the SHA-256 for each file.

Two of the recorded measurements are controls: an invented path under lindas.admin.ch (POST 404, so the 404 on /sparql is real) and an invented class in the fsvo namespace (0 instances, so the previously queried foag class genuinely does not exist). Without them each measurement would only show what we received. The recorder aborts if a control stops discriminating, if a pinned resource disappears, if a header line is empty or starts with a BOM, or if one of the findings is superseded.

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MCP Protocol Version

The protocol version is negotiated at the initialize handshake by the SDK, not chosen by this server. The revision it is built and audited against is 2025-11-25, which is LATEST_PROTOCOL_VERSION in the pinned mcp release that fastmcp brings in.

tests/test_protocol_version.py holds three things against each other: this line, that SDK constant, and the revision a real handshake against the server object actually returns. An SDK bump that changes the revision therefore fails CI instead of drifting silently.

The sister servers in this portfolio pin a pair of revisions — a handshake ceiling and a modern one — because mcp 2.x serves two protocol eras over the same server. fastmcp 3.x pins mcp 1.x, where mcp.types.version does not exist and one revision is the whole story. test_das_sdk_kennt_hier_nur_eine_aera is tied to the SDK rather than to this paragraph and fails the day an upgrade brings the two-era constants in.

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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

Installation

Run via uv's uvx — no clone or manual install needed. Add to your MCP client config (mcpServers for Claude Desktop, Cursor and Windsurf; use a top-level servers key for VS Code in .vscode/mcp.json):

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