UK Food Hygiene Rating Monitor (FSA)

A UK restaurant hygiene checker with built-in food hygiene monitoring. Search official UK food hygiene ratings and get alerted when they change. Built for food-safety consultants, suppliers, delivery platforms, insurers, journalists and anyone who needs to watch restaurants, takeaways, cafés, pubs, shops, schools and care homes across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The records come from the official UK Food Hygiene Ratings API — the public Food Standards Agency API that publishes FHRS data for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and FHIS data for Scotland (https://api.ratings.food.gov.uk, header x-api-version: 2). No API key, no browser, no proxies and no scraping of web pages.

What makes this Actor different: most FSA Actors on the Store are one-off search tools. This one keeps a snapshot under a monitorKey. Schedule the same input weekly (or daily) with onlyChanges: true and you only pay for businesses that are new, re-rated or removed.

What you can do with it

• Lead generation. Find takeaways and restaurants rated 0–2 in a council or postcode district. Those businesses have been told to improve and are actively looking for help (consultants, pest control, training, cleaning, EPOS).
• Food hygiene monitoring. Watch a postcode, a council or a chain and get only the new openings, rating drops, rating improvements and disappeared listings since the last run.
• Due diligence. Check the current rating and inspection date for a supplier list, a franchise estate or an acquisition target.
• Local reporting. Export a clean spreadsheet of every food business in an area, with the official FSA page link on every row.

Input

Use any mix of filters. You need at least one of: business name, postcode, council or business type.

Field	What it does
Business name	Partial match on the trading name, e.g. Greggs or Pizza.
Postcode / address	Full or partial, e.g. LS1 4AP or LS1.
Council (name or ID)	As the FSA lists it: Leeds, Westminster, Cardiff, or the numeric LocalAuthorityId (397). Names are looked up live. Ambiguous names fail with the matching options.
Business type (name or ID)	e.g. Takeaway/sandwich shop, Takeaway (unique partial match) or 7844.
Minimum / maximum rating	0–5. Useful for "only 0–2 rated takeaways in Leeds". Non-numeric ratings (Scottish Pass, Exempt, Awaiting Inspection) are excluded when a rating filter is set.
Max results	Hard cap (default 500). You are never charged for more than this.
Monitor key	Name of the stored snapshot. Runs that share a key are compared.
Output only changed/new	If true, only output new, changed and removed businesses after the first (baseline) run.

Example: low-rated takeaways in Leeds, then only the changes

{
  "localAuthority": "Leeds",
  "businessType": "Takeaway/sandwich shop",
  "minRating": 0,
  "maxRating": 2,
  "maxResults": 500,
  "monitorKey": "leeds-low-takeaways",
  "onlyChanges": true
}

Example: one postcode district

{
  "postcode": "LS1",
  "maxResults": 500,
  "monitorKey": "ls1-all",
  "onlyChanges": false
}

Output

One dataset row per establishment, ready for CSV, Excel or JSON, or for Zapier, Make or n8n.

{
  "fhrsId": 123456,
  "businessName": "Example Kebab House",
  "businessType": "Takeaway/sandwich shop",
  "addressLine1": "1 Example Street",
  "town": "Leeds",
  "postcode": "LS1 4AP",
  "localAuthority": "Leeds",
  "scheme": "FHRS",
  "rating": "2",
  "ratingNumeric": 2,
  "ratingDate": "2026-09-14",
  "newRatingPending": false,
  "latitude": 53.7997,
  "longitude": -1.5492,
  "sourceUrl": "https://ratings.food.gov.uk/business/123456",
  "changeType": "changed",
  "previousRating": "4",
  "previousRatingDate": "2024-03-02"
}

changeType values: baseline (first run), unchanged, new, changed, removed.

A SUMMARY record in the key-value store gives totals and counts per change type.

Phone numbers, emails and inspection score breakdowns are deliberately left out. Some businesses are sole traders trading under their own names; use the data only for food-hygiene purposes and respect UK GDPR.

Monitoring

Each monitorKey keeps a snapshot in the named key-value store fsa-hygiene-monitor-state-v2 in your own Apify account (created automatically on your first run; the Actor keeps Limited permissions). Schedule the same input (for example weekly) with onlyChanges: true to get only new, re-rated or removed businesses.

Removal detection is skipped, with a warning, when results were cut off by maxResults, so truncation is never reported as a removal. Raise maxResults if you need complete removal detection for a large council.

Network errors, HTTP 429 and 5xx are retried up to 4 times with backoff (1s, 2s, 4s, 8s + jitter). Other 4xx errors fail immediately.

Pricing

Pay per result: $1.00 per 1,000 establishments ($0.001 per row), plus Apify's minimum actor-start event ($0.00005). You are charged only for rows delivered. Platform compute is included in the event price.

A 50-result postcode search costs about 5 cents. A 500-business weekly monitor that returns 8 changes costs a fraction of a cent if onlyChanges is on (you pay for the 8 change rows, not the 500).

Good to know

• Ratings show the hygiene standard at the date of inspection, not food quality. Always check ratingDate and newRatingPending.
• England, Wales and Northern Ireland use 0–5 (FHRS). Scotland uses Pass / Improvement Required (FHIS).
• Coverage is whatever the FSA publishes (local authorities update after inspections).
• For a full nightly dump of every authority, use the FSA open-data files rather than querying the live API repeatedly.

Related tools

Other UK open-data tools from the same publisher:

• UK Companies House Compliance Monitor — watch a list of company numbers for overdue accounts and status changes.
• UK House Price Index by Local Authority — official HM Land Registry averages, index and sales volume.
• UK Food Hygiene Ratings MCP server — the same Food Standards Agency API, as tools for Claude, Cursor or any MCP client.
• n8n template: UK bank holiday planner (22252). A food-hygiene rating-change alerts workflow (22159) is under review; link it here once it is live.

Data licence and attribution

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Food Standards Agency, https://ratings.food.gov.uk.

This Actor is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FSA. It uses no FSA logos or rating badge images.