UK Food Hygiene Ratings Scraper (FSA)

Scrape the UK's official food hygiene register, published by the Food Standards Agency. Every restaurant, takeaway, pub, shop, school, care home and food producer inspected by a UK council is in here — roughly 600,000 premises across 363 local authorities — with its rating, inspection scores, address and coordinates.

No API key, no account. Open Government Licence data.

What you get

Field	Description
businessName, businessType, businessTypeId	Premises and what kind it is
ratingValue, ratingNumeric, ratingScheme, ratingDate	The published rating and when it was given
hygieneScore, structuralScore, managementScore	The three inspection components behind the rating
address, addressLines, postcode	Full address
latitude, longitude	Coordinates, present on nearly every record
phone	Where the council publishes one
localAuthority, localAuthorityEmail, localAuthorityWebsite	The inspecting council
newRatingPending	A re-inspection result is on its way
fhrsId, url	Identifier and a direct link to the public listing

Use cases

• Food-safety consultants and training providers — premises rated 0–2 are businesses with a problem they are legally motivated to fix. Filter by rating band and postcode to get a local prospect list with addresses.
• Suppliers to hospitality — EPOS, equipment, packaging, cleaning and insurance sales teams get a segmented list of restaurants, takeaways and pubs by area.
• Delivery platforms and marketplaces — onboard or screen merchants against their current rating.
• Insurers and lenders — hygiene ratings as a risk signal for food businesses.
• Property and location analysts — coordinates on every record make catchment and density analysis straightforward.

Input

Option	Description
localAuthorities	Council names, matched as substrings (Birmingham, City of London). Empty means all 363.
minRating / maxRating	The 0–5 FHRS band. maxRating: 2 is the classic prospecting filter.
ratingValues	Exact labels, for either scheme: 5, 4, Pass, Improvement Required, Exempt.
businessTypeIds	1 = Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen, 7843 = Takeaway, 7842 = Pub/bar/nightclub, 5 = Caring premises, 4613 = School/college.
postcodePrefix	e.g. EC3. Spacing and case ignored.
ratedAfter / ratedBefore	Inspection date window — new ratings, or stale ones.
maxHygieneScore	Keep better performers. Higher scores mean worse hygiene in this scheme.
onlyWithPhone, excludeScotland	Trim to contactable premises, or to the 0–5 scheme only.
maxItems, pageSize, includeRawFields	Run size, request size, raw payload.

Example: poorly-rated food businesses in central London

{
  "localAuthorities": ["City of London Corporation"],
  "maxRating": 2,
  "excludeScotland": true,
  "maxItems": 500
}

Example: every takeaway in Birmingham and Manchester

{
  "localAuthorities": ["Birmingham", "Manchester"],
  "businessTypeIds": ["7843"],
  "maxItems": 5000
}

Two rating schemes

England, Wales and Northern Ireland use FHRS — a 0–5 score where 5 is best. Scotland uses FHIS, which publishes Pass, Improvement Required or Exempt and no number.

Numeric filters (minRating, maxRating, maxHygieneScore) therefore apply to FHRS records only and exclude Scottish ones, rather than inventing an equivalence between the two scales. To include Scotland, filter with ratingValues instead.

How the run works

The FSA API requires at least one filter on every request, so this Actor queries authority by authority. Running without localAuthorities walks all 363 — that is the full national dataset and a large run, so set maxItems deliberately.

Rating and inspection filters are applied by the Actor over the records it reads, because the API accepts a ratingKey parameter and then ignores it.

Data source and licence

Data comes from the FSA food hygiene rating API, published under the Open Government Licence. Ratings are business information about premises, not personal data; phone numbers and emails in the output are the ones the councils publish for the business and for themselves.

Pricing

Billed per establishment delivered. Records that are read but filtered out, and duplicates, are not charged.