The data behind FindMyHygiene

FindMyHygiene is an independent UK-registered publisher of food hygiene ratings. Every rating on this site originates with the UK Food Standards Agency’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS). We republish this public-interest data cleanly, keep it current, and index it by the things people actually search — cuisine, city, neighbourhood, rating trend.

Where the ratings come from

Every UK food business is inspected by its local authority’s environmental health officer. The officer records three scores — hygiene, structural condition, and management of food safety — each on a scale of 0 to 20 where 0 means “very good” and 20 means “urgent improvement necessary”. Those three are combined by the Food Standards Agency into a single overall rating from 0 to 5.

A rating of 5 means very good. 4 means good. 3 means generally satisfactory. 2 means improvement necessary. 1 means major improvement necessary. 0 means urgent improvement necessary.

The Food Standards Agency publishes the results for around 600,000 UK establishments. We republish around 270,000 — the restaurants, takeaways, pubs, bars, hotels and cafés that ordinary diners want to find. We exclude establishments that aren’t public-facing (schools, care homes, hospitals, factories) to keep the index focused.

How often we update

Our systems synchronise with the Food Standards Agency every 24 hours. A rating that was published by a local authority yesterday will appear here today. New inspections, rating changes, newly-registered venues, and closed businesses are all reflected within that 24-hour window.

When a venue’s rating changes, we preserve the previous rating so you can see the direction of travel — whether a kitchen improved from a 3 to a 5, or dropped from a 4 to a 2. That history powers the “This week” story cards on our homepage and the weekly movement pages at /this-week/.

What we don’t do

We don’t alter ratings. We don’t round them. We don’t editorialise them. The score is the Food Standards Agency’s — our only contribution is making it searchable. If a venue’s rating looks wrong to the owner, the remedy is with the Agency and the local authority, not with us. We’ll happily update our record when the Agency updates theirs.

We don’t run a rating of our own. We don’t accept payment to change or hide a rating. We don’t remove a rating on request. Our listings are free to claim (see Claim your listing) but the rating itself is non-negotiable — it’s public information from a public body.

Data attribution

Food hygiene rating data is © Crown copyright, supplied by the Food Standards Agency and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This means we’re legally free to republish it, provided we credit the source — which we do on every venue page and in the footer of every page on this site.

We are an independent publisher. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operating on behalf of the Food Standards Agency or any UK local authority.

Getting the rating wrong?

If you operate a venue and believe your rating on this site is stale or incorrect, please first check the canonical record at ratings.food.gov.uk. If ours matches theirs, then you’ll need to follow their appeals process — contact your local authority’s environmental health team. If ours is out of date compared to theirs, email us at kaeltripton@gmail.com and we’ll re-sync your record manually.