UK Food Business Monitor — FSA hygiene register

Watches the Food Standards Agency register for newly registered food businesses — and, optionally, hygiene-rating changes — in the local authorities you choose. Each scheduled run emits only what changed since the last run, with address, rating and coordinates. Optional webhook POST to Slack, Zapier, Make or n8n.

Who it's for

Buyer	Use
EPOS / booking / kitchen-display vendors	A new restaurant or takeaway = a system to sell, week one
Food & drink wholesalers, packaging suppliers	New caterers in your delivery area
Commercial kitchen equipment / refrigeration	New premises fitting out
Business insurance brokers	New food businesses need cover
Accountants & bookkeepers	New hospitality clients in your town
Food-safety consultants / PR	A rating drop to 0–2 = an urgent-help lead
Local press / researchers	New-opening and rating-change feeds by area

Quick start

1. No API key — the FSA register is free open data.
2. Set localAuthorities to the councils you cover (names like "Manchester" or "Leeds"; fragments match, so "Kensington" finds "Kensington and Chelsea"). Optionally narrow by businessTypeIds.
3. Run once — the first run only seeds the state (emits nothing), because it would otherwise dump every establishment. Set emitOnFirstRun: true if you want them all once.
4. Schedule it daily. Later runs report new registrations and rating changes.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
localAuthorities	string[]	—	Required. Local-authority names or numeric IDs. Name fragments match.
businessTypeIds	string[]	[] (all)	FSA type IDs. Common: 1 Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen · 7844 Takeaway/sandwich shop · 7843 Pub/bar/nightclub · 7846 Mobile caterer · 7840 Supermarket · 7842 Hotel/B&B · 4613 Retailers-other · 5 Hospitals/Childcare/Caring.
trackRatingChanges	boolean	true	Also emit establishments whose rating changed since last run.
emitOnFirstRun	boolean	false	First run seeds silently by default; set true to emit every establishment once.
webhookUrl	string	—	POST {source, authorities, count, establishments[]} each run.
maxResults	integer 1–10000	1000	Cap per run.

Output

One dataset item per changed establishment:

Field	Example
fhrs_id	593681
change_type	"new" or "rating_changed"
previous_rating	"5" (only for rating_changed)
business_name	"210 BISTRO"
business_type / business_type_id	"Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen" / 1
rating_value / rating_date	"Pass" / "2026-03-26T00:00:00"
local_authority	"Aberdeen City"
address / post_code	"210 Market Street, Aberdeen, AB11 5PQ" / "AB11 5PQ"
latitude / longitude	57.142278 / -2.092258
link	https://ratings.food.gov.uk/business/en-GB/593681
scraped_at	"2026-09-03T09:00:00.000Z"

Ratings are 0–5 in England/Wales/NI and Pass / Improvement Required in Scotland.

How it works

Cross-run state lives in a named key-value store, uk-food-monitor-state, namespaced by a hash of the authority + business-type filter. It holds the set of seen FHRS IDs and, when trackRatingChanges is on, a map of FHRSID → last rating. Each run pulls the current establishment list for every configured authority and:

• an FHRS ID not seen before → change_type: "new"
• a seen FHRS ID whose rating differs from the stored one → change_type: "rating_changed"

The seen-set is capped at 200,000 IDs.

Notes on the FSA API

• No key. Requires x-api-version: 2 and rejects unfiltered establishment queries — this actor always scopes by local authority.
• Transient 5xx / 429 are retried (3 attempts, backoff); a hard failure mid-run pushes what was collected and resumes next run (partial: true).
• The register is refreshed by each local authority on its own cadence (most daily). "New" means new to the register, which closely tracks new registrations.

Local development

npm install
npm test
echo '{"localAuthorities":["Aberdeen City"],"businessTypeIds":[7846]}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
npm start

Deploy

$npm i -g apify-cli && apify login && apify push

Data source & licensing

Data from the Food Standards Agency food hygiene rating scheme (ratings.food.gov.uk), published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Related actors

Part of a small suite of UK public-register monitors, same publisher, same pattern (incremental, no duplicates, webhook-ready):

• UK New Company Monitor — new incorporations by SIC / location
• UK Insolvency Notice Monitor — winding-up, administration, bankruptcy (The Gazette)
• UK Public Tender Monitor — public-sector tenders by CPV / value (Contracts Finder)
• UK Company Change Monitor — watchlist diffing: status, charges, officers, filings

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Changelog

• 0.1 — Initial release: multi-authority, business-type filter, new-business
  • rating-change detection, first-run seeding, webhook, transient-error retry.