🌭 Chicago Food Inspection Scraper

🚀 Pull Chicago Department of Public Health food inspection results with pass/fail outcomes, risk levels, and violation details.

The Chicago Food Inspection Scraper pulls live results from the City of Chicago Department of Public Health open data portal. Each record carries the establishment name, license number, address, risk category, inspection type, pass/fail outcome, and the full text of violations cited.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Journalists and civic-tech researchers	Public-records reporting, accountability dashboards
Real-estate and insurance analysts	Neighborhood risk modeling, due diligence
Marketers and lead-gen teams	Business prospecting, market sizing
Data engineers and BI teams	ETL pipelines, automated alerting
Academics and urban planners	Policy research, public-health analysis

📋 What the Chicago Food Inspections Scraper does

• Pulls live records from the official open-data API in batches of up to 1,000 rows per request
• Lets you filter by the source's own native columns before download (no post-processing required)
• Returns one normalized JSON row per record with stable, predictable field names
• Pushes results to a clean Apify dataset that exports to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML
• Auto-paginates so you can pull thousands of records in one run

💡 Why it matters: government open-data portals throttle, rate-limit, and break under heavy load. This actor wraps the official endpoint, handles pagination, normalizes nulls, and gives you a stable schema even when the source UI rearranges its dashboard.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: address, aka_name, city, dba_name, facility_type, imageUrl, inspection_date, inspection_id, inspection_type, latitude, license_, longitude, results, risk, scrapedAt, sourceUrl, state, title, url, violations, zip. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (free credits included)
2. Open the actor page
3. Set maxItems and any filters you need
4. Click Run
5. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	What it does
NYC Restaurant Inspections	NYC DOHMH grades and violations
Chicago Food Inspections	Chicago Department of Public Health results
LA Business Licenses	LA City active business registry
NYC DCWP Business Licenses	Every NYC consumer-protection licensed business
Chicago 311 Service Requests	All Chicago non-emergency complaints

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with Chicago Food Inspections or its publishing agency. Only publicly available data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.