UK New Food Businesses (FSA Hygiene Ratings)

Find UK new food businesses: premises registered with their council that are awaiting their first hygiene inspection (the default view), and optionally premises recently rated under the Food Standards Agency's Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS). Useful for suppliers, equipment/insurance/software vendors, and local-market researchers.

Search by local authority (name or FSA ID) and/or postcode + radius, optionally filter by business type and (for rated businesses) days back, and get one clean dataset row per business.

How it works

The Actor reads the official FSA FHRS API (no key needed, API v2), pages through the selected area, and keeps establishments according to the What to return mode below. Requests are throttled (max ~2/second) and retried on errors.

What counts as "new" (date rules)

The FHRS API marks first-time premises with RatingValue: "AwaitingInspection" / RatingKey: "fhrs_awaitinginspection_en-gb". Their RatingDate is not empty but a placeholder (e.g. 1901-01-01T00:00:00), so they can never match a "last N days" test. The Actor therefore:

• identifies them by rating key/value and treats any rating date before 1990 as "no date" (ratingDate is null in the output; awaitingInspection is true);
• returns all current awaiting-inspection businesses in the area (after the business-type filter), not date-filtered. daysBack does not apply to them;
• sorts them highest FHRS ID first. ASSUMPTION: FHRS IDs are allocated in increasing order, so a higher ID is likely a more recent registration; the FSA publishes no registration date. A large authority can have hundreds awaiting, some for a long time, so use maxResults to take the newest.

Important limits (please read)

• Recently rated is not the same as new. The API exposes only the latest rating date. A business rated 10 days ago may be brand new or an established business that was re-inspected. Awaiting inspection is the cleaner "new" signal, but it also includes premises the council has not yet got round to inspecting.
• Ratings change. FSA's terms say users must use the current rating or show the date it was updated – every row includes ratingDate; the data is a snapshot taken at run time.
• Coverage is England, Wales and Northern Ireland (and Scotland's FHS scheme, which uses "Pass"/"Improvement Required" values). Some records lack coordinates or have FSA-side data quirks, which are passed through unchanged.
• Blank addresses are common among awaiting-inspection rows. Measured example from one authority (Bristol, one run in Oct 2026): 234 of 563 awaiting-inspection rows (about 42%) had a blank address, and some had a partial postcode. This is how they appear in the FSA records; the Actor passes them through unchanged. It is a single-authority example, not a national figure.
• Data comes from local authorities, so it can lag real-world events.

Input

Field	Meaning	Default
localAuthorities	Names (e.g. Cambridge City) or numeric FSA IDs. Unique partial names work.	–
postcode, radiusMiles	Centre and radius (geocoded with postcodes.io)	radius 5
resultMode	awaitingInspection (default), recentlyRated, or both	awaitingInspection
daysBack	Rated within the last N days. Only for recentlyRated / both; ignored for awaiting-inspection rows	30
businessTypes	Optional FSA business types, e.g. Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen, Pub/bar/nightclub	all
includeAwaitingInspection	Deprecated legacy flag. true → resultMode: "both", false → "recentlyRated". An explicit resultMode always wins; a deprecation line is logged	–
maxResults	Cap on rows (you pay per row)	100

Provide at least one of localAuthorities or postcode. Results: rated rows newest rating first, then awaiting-inspection rows highest FHRS ID first; de-duplicated by FHRS ID.

Example input:

{ "localAuthorities": ["Bristol"], "maxResults": 100 }

Recently rated instead:

{ "localAuthorities": ["Cambridge City", "Hackney"], "resultMode": "recentlyRated", "daysBack": 30, "maxResults": 20 }

Output (one item per business)

{
  "fhrsId": 1935132,
  "businessName": "BaxterStorey - Amazon LHR140",
  "businessType": "Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen",
  "address": "The Bard 20 Curtain Road London, Hackney, London",
  "postcode": "EC21 3NG",
  "localAuthority": "Hackney",
  "ratingValue": "5",
  "ratingDate": "2026-10-16",   // null when awaiting inspection
  "awaitingInspection": false,
  "latitude": null,
  "longitude": null,
  "fsaUrl": "https://ratings.food.gov.uk/business/1935132",
  "source": "Food Standards Agency, FHRS open data (Open Government Licence v3.0)"
}

Note: values such as the postcode ("EC21 3NG" above) are passed through unchanged from FSA data; the Actor does not validate or alter them.

Postcode-radius searches also include distanceMiles. Only business data published by the FSA is returned.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.005 per business returned (i.e. $5 per 1,000), plus Apify's standard platform terms. Set maxResults to cap spend.

Data source and licence

Data: Food Standards Agency – Food Hygiene Rating Scheme open data via the FHRS API. The FSA states that its content, including food hygiene ratings information, is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (FSA terms and conditions).

© Crown copyright. Contains public sector information licensed under OGL v3.0. Source: Food Standards Agency.

This Actor is independent and not endorsed by the FSA. It does not use the FHRS sticker imagery or the FSA logo.

Run locally

npm install, put input JSON in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json, then node main.js (or apify run). Results land in storage/datasets/default/.