Restaurant Health Scores

What does Restaurant Health Scores do?

Restaurant Health Scores is an automated data extraction tool that retrieves restaurant health inspection results and grades from public databases. For New York City, it connects directly to the NYC Open Data API to fetch detailed inspection records including restaurant names, addresses, inspection dates, health scores, letter grades, violation types, and critical violation flags. The actor provides comprehensive food safety data that helps consumers make informed dining choices, helps researchers study food safety trends, and helps restaurant operators benchmark their performance against competitors.

Why use Restaurant Health Scores?

Restaurant health inspection data is publicly available but often difficult to access in a structured, searchable format. City health department websites may be slow, have limited search functionality, or present data in hard-to-analyze formats. This actor consolidates inspection data into clean, structured records that can be sorted, filtered, and analyzed. Restaurant review platforms can supplement their listings with official health scores. Real estate investors can evaluate neighborhood food safety profiles. Public health researchers can analyze inspection trends across different areas and cuisine types. Restaurant owners can monitor their competitors and track their own inspection history. The data exports seamlessly to JSON, CSV, and Excel for integration with any analysis tool.

How to use Restaurant Health Scores

1. Enter a city name (New York City has the most comprehensive data available)
2. Set the maximum number of inspection records to retrieve
3. Run the actor to fetch the latest health inspection data
4. Download your results in JSON, CSV, or Excel format

For NYC, the actor pulls directly from the official NYC Open Data API. For other cities, it attempts to find and scrape publicly available health department data.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Description	Default
city	string	City to search for restaurant health inspections	New York
maxResults	integer	Maximum number of inspection records to return	50

Output Fields

Field	Description
restaurantName	Name of the restaurant
address	Street address including borough
inspectionDate	Date of the health inspection
score	Numerical health inspection score
grade	Letter grade (A, B, C, etc.)
violationType	Description of violations found
criticalFlag	Whether the violation is critical or not

Cost Estimate

This actor uses the Mid pricing tier ($0.00075 per page event). For NYC searches using the Open Data API, runs are extremely fast and cost-effective since only a single API call is needed. A typical run retrieving 50 records with 1024 MB default memory costs well under $0.01. Larger queries or multi-city searches may cost slightly more but remain very affordable for the volume of data returned.

Tips and Best Practices

• Start with "New York" as the city for the most comprehensive and reliable results
• Filter by grade to find only A-rated restaurants or identify those with lower scores
• Sort by inspection date to see the most recent inspections first
• Use the criticalFlag field to identify serious health violations
• Schedule regular runs to track how restaurant scores change over time
• Lower scores are better in NYC scoring (0 is perfect, higher numbers indicate more violations)

For complementary food and health data tools, check out these actors:

• Food Recall Monitor for FDA food recall alerts
• Thrift Store Finder for local business discovery