UK Food Hygiene Ratings Scraper — FSA Establishments

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🎯 What this scrapes

The FSA publishes a hygiene rating for every food business in the UK, which makes it one of the few open datasets with a name, an address and a phone number for hundreds of thousands of hospitality venues. The API is fussy — it needs a version header, refuses unfiltered queries outright, and splits the address across four numbered fields. This Actor handles all three and hands back one clean row per establishment.

🔥 What we handle for you

sends the x-api-version header the API requires, avoiding its misleading 404 joins the FSA's four numbered address lines into one readable field keeps Scotland's non-numeric FHIS ratings instead of dropping them on a numeric filter

💡 Use cases

• Build a hospitality prospect list with names, addresses and phone numbers by council area.
• Screen suppliers or franchise sites against their current hygiene rating.
• Track rating changes across a chain or a town over time.
• Map food businesses in a catchment area using the published coordinates.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
businessName	string	no	'cafe'	Match establishments whose name contains this text. Leave empty to filter by authority or town instead.
localAuthorityId	string	no	'—'	FSA local authority ID, e.g. 413. Use this to pull a whole council area.
address	string	no	'—'	Match on address text — a town, street or postcode fragment.
minRating	integer	no	0	Only establishments rated at least this (0-5). Leave at 0 for every rating. Non-numeric ratings (Scotland's…
maxResults	integer	no	100	Stop after this many establishments. Each one is one billed result row.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': False}	The FSA API is public and does not need a proxy. Leave this off unless your account requires egress through Apify Proxy.

Example input

{
  "businessName": "cafe",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
fhrs_id	integer	FSA establishment identifier.
business_name	string	Trading name.
business_type	string	FSA business category.
rating_value	string	Hygiene rating: 0-5, or Pass / Improvement Required in Scotland.
rating_date	string	Date of the rating inspection.
address	string	Street address, joined from the FSA's four address lines.
postcode	string	Postcode.
phone	string	Registered phone number, when published.
local_authority	string	Local authority name.
local_authority_website	string	Local authority website.
latitude	number	Latitude, when geocoded.
longitude	number	Longitude, when geocoded.
scheme_type	string	FHRS (England/Wales/NI) or FHIS (Scotland).

Example output

{}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.05	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.002	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $2.05. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Returns the current rating only — the API does not expose full inspection history.
• Phone numbers and coordinates are published for most but not all establishments.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key?

No. The FSA API is open. The Actor sends the version header the API requires, which is the usual reason a hand-rolled request gets a confusing 404.

Why must I set a filter?

The API rejects an unfiltered query with a 403 explaining it is CPU intensive. Give it a name, an authority or an address and it answers immediately.

What about Scottish ratings?

Scotland uses FHIS (Pass / Improvement Required) rather than 0-5. Those rows come through unchanged and are never dropped by the minimum-rating filter.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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