Restaurant Health Inspection Scraper

Overview

The Restaurant Health Inspection Scraper is an Apify actor that extracts restaurant health inspection data from public city and county databases. It collects restaurant names, addresses, inspection dates, scores, grades, violation counts, and detailed violation descriptions to help consumers, researchers, and food safety professionals assess restaurant cleanliness and compliance.

Features

• Search health inspection records by city and state
• Filter results by minimum inspection score
• Extract detailed violation descriptions for each inspection
• Collect letter grades and numerical scores
• Support for multiple open data portal formats
• Access both JSON APIs and HTML inspection databases

Input Configuration

The actor accepts the following input parameters:

• city - City to search for health inspection records (e.g., Dallas, New York, Los Angeles). Defaults to Dallas.
• state - State abbreviation (e.g., TX, NY, CA). Defaults to TX.
• minScore - Minimum inspection score to include in results (0-100). Defaults to 0.
• maxResults - Maximum number of inspection records to return. Defaults to 100.

Output Format

Each inspection record in the output dataset includes:

• restaurantName - Name of the inspected restaurant
• address - Street address of the establishment
• inspectionDate - Date of the health inspection
• score - Numerical inspection score (typically 0-100)
• grade - Letter grade (A, B, C, etc.)
• violationsFound - Number of violations identified
• violationDescriptions - Detailed descriptions of each violation
• city - City of the restaurant
• state - State of the restaurant
• url - Source data URL
• scrapedAt - Data extraction timestamp

Use Cases

This scraper is essential for consumers checking restaurant cleanliness before dining, food safety researchers analyzing compliance patterns across regions, public health officials monitoring inspection trends, journalists investigating food safety in their communities, real estate investors evaluating restaurant locations, and restaurant owners benchmarking their scores against competitors. The violation details provide granular insight into specific compliance issues.

Cost and Performance

The actor runs on minimal memory (256 MB) and processes inspection records efficiently. Pricing uses Apify platform billing with pay-per-event at $0.75 per 1,000 results, making it very cost-effective for both one-time lookups and ongoing monitoring.

Integrations

Export health inspection data using Apify integrations to Google Sheets, databases, Slack, Zapier, or custom endpoints. The structured JSON output is ideal for building food safety dashboards, alerting systems, or compliance tracking tools.

Tips and Troubleshooting

• Major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Chicago have the most comprehensive public inspection databases
• Use minScore to filter out low-scoring establishments and focus on top-rated restaurants
• Inspection scoring varies by jurisdiction; some use 0-100, others use letter grades only
• If no results are found for a city, try the county name instead as some databases are county-level