Scores on the doors

Food hygiene ratings near you...

FAQ

• What are "scores on the doors"?

  To quote the Food Standards Agency website:

  The food hygiene rating or inspection result given to a business reflects the standards of food hygiene found on the date of inspection or visit by the Local Authority. The food hygiene rating is not a guide to food quality.

  You can download the data from the FSA or use the FSA API.

• Business X no longer exists

  We update this data from the FSA once a day but the FSA dataset does seems to contain businesses that no longer exist (or have moved). The FSA compile their data from Local Authorities. You should probably get in touch with your Local Authority and let them know what needs updating.

• The distances seem off. What's up with that?

  The Food Standards Agency provide locations of premises based on postcode centroids. That means there is a limited level of accuracy with which we can calculate the distance between you and each of the food premises. We could probably do a better job by trying to cross compare with businesses in OpenStreetMap but the data quality (in both) means that name matches are hard and it would take a lot more time than we have to spare. Being up to 100m or so off isn't too bad for the time being.

• What will you do with my location information?

  We care about privacy. Obviously, we need your precise location to find nearby food premises. However we keep that information within your browser and do our best to limit what we send to our server. So, if you click the "Use my location" button we'll:

  1. round your location to a roughly 50km grid
  2. ask our server for the boundaries of Local Authorities in your grid cell
  3. calculate (in the page) which Local Authority you are in
  4. ask for all the premises in that Local Authority

  So, our server never gets to know your location more precisely than a Local Authority or 50km (whichever is smaller).

• Do you set cookies?

  No. There's no need.