About HygieneCheck

We take the UK's official food hygiene ratings and try to make them mean something. A number out of five tells you almost nothing on its own; what the inspector found, how the place compares to its neighbours, and whether the rating still describes the business today, that is the useful part, and that is what we build.

Where the data comes from

Every food business in the United Kingdom is inspected by its local council. The council sets the rating. The Food Standards Agency publishes it for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Food Standards Scotland publishes the equivalent for Scotland, both under the Open Government Licence.

We read that published data directly, every night, from all 363 councils, covering 609,845 food businesses. Nothing here is scraped, guessed, or bought.

What we add

The raw data is a rating, a date, and three numbers that run backwards, a lower sub-score is a better one. On its own it is close to unreadable. So on every page we work out:

• What the rating means, in the Food Standards Agency's own words rather than our paraphrase of them.
• How the business compares to every other place its council inspects, not a vague "above average", but the real distribution.
• What the inspector actually found, across the three areas they score, and which one held the rating down.
• Whether the rating is still current. A 5 from four years ago and a 5 from last month are not the same claim.
• What has changed. The FSA publishes only a business's rating today. We keep our own record of what it scored before, see recent changes.

What we cannot do

This is the part worth being blunt about.

We are not the Food Standards Agency, and we have no connection to it beyond reading its published data. We cannot change a rating, not for a business that thinks its score is unfair, and not for anyone else. Neither can the business. A rating is set by the council's inspector, and a business that disagrees has 21 days to appeal to that council.

If a rating shown here looks wrong, the authoritative record is the FSA's and the council's. Corrections made there flow through to us. If you have a concern about a specific place, food that made you ill, something you saw, the people who can act are the council's environmental health team, not us.

And a rating is not a food-safety guarantee. It records what an inspector found on one day. A business rated 5 can still make a mistake; a business rated 1 is not necessarily about to. We wrote a guide about exactly this.

Scotland is different, and we do not pretend otherwise

Scotland runs its own scheme, a Pass or an Improvement Required, never a score out of five. Food Standards Scotland is explicit that the two schemes are not comparable. So a Scottish venue on this site is never ranked against an English one, never shown a star chart it did not earn, and never given a percentile it cannot have. It gets fewer sentences, not vaguer ones.

How this site is paid for

HygieneCheck is free, has no accounts, and asks for nothing. It is supported by advertising. Ads never influence what a page says: a rating is a fact published by a regulator, and no advertiser can move it. We do not accept payment from food businesses, in any form, for anything.

Corrections

If something on this site is wrong, a business in the wrong town, a name mangled, a rating misread, we want to know, and we will fix it. The underlying rating itself can only be corrected by the council that issued it.

Data from the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland under the Open Government Licence. This site is not affiliated with either body, nor with any local authority.