UK Food Business Leads — new openings and hygiene failures

Find UK food businesses at the exact moment they need you. Two triggers, swept from all 363 local authority registers:

See it run

• Just registered, awaiting first inspection. The business is opening. It is buying a till system, a website, insurance, suppliers, a cleaner, an accountant — all in the same fortnight.
• Just failed a hygiene inspection. A rating of 0, 1 or 2 is public, embarrassing and time-limited. These businesses buy food-safety consultancy, deep cleaning, pest control and staff training, and they buy quickly.

Covers 613,092 establishments across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, from the official Food Standards Agency register.

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Why this is not just another hygiene-ratings lookup

The FSA API refuses a national query outright — it answers This is a CPU intensive query: please use one of the documented filters. So a nationwide picture means walking 363 local authorities one at a time and stitching the results together.

Other tools on the market let you look up one business you already know about. This one sweeps the country and hands you the businesses you did not know about, filtered down to the ones worth a phone call this week.

It also flattens two different rating schemes into one comparable scale, so "failed" means the same thing in Aberdeen as in Brighton. England, Wales and Northern Ireland score 0-5; Scotland uses Pass / Improvement Required. You should not have to know that to ask for businesses in trouble.

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What you get

Field	Notes
name	Trading name as registered
businessType	Restaurant, takeaway, pub, hotel, mobile caterer, retailer, and 8 more
address, postcode	Full inspected premises address
localAuthority, region	The council, and one of 12 FSA regions
rating	As published: 5…0, Pass, Improvement Required, AwaitingInspection, Exempt
ratingScore	Both schemes flattened to 0-5, so you can compare and sort
ratingBand	excellent, good, satisfactory, improvement_needed, major_improvement_needed, urgent_improvement_needed, awaiting_inspection, exempt
ratingDate, daysSinceRating	When it was last inspected, and how long ago
hygieneScore, structuralScore, managementScore	The three component scores where published
isNewlyRegistered	true if awaiting first inspection
needsHelp	true if scoring 2 or below
latitude, longitude	Present on about 80%
councilEmail, councilWebsite	The inspecting authority's own contact
sourceUrl	The public FSA page for that business
source, licence, scrapedAt	Provenance on every record

Be aware: the FSA does not publish business phone numbers or emails. What you get is the trigger, the trading name and the exact address. Most buyers match that against their own data, or work it as a territory list. If you need phone and email on every row, this is the wrong dataset and I would rather you knew now.

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Coverage

Region	Establishments
London	81,519
South East	79,389
North West	65,626
Scotland	59,052
South West	54,454
East Counties	54,027
Yorkshire and Humberside	50,627
West Midlands	50,235
East Midlands	43,939
Wales	34,257
North East	23,019
Northern Ireland	16,948
Total	613,092

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Example inputs

This month's failures in London — the urgent list

{
  "regions": ["London"],
  "onlyNeedingHelp": true,
  "ratedWithinDays": 30
}

Restaurants and takeaways opening right now across the South East

{
  "regions": ["South East"],
  "onlyNewlyRegistered": true,
  "businessTypes": ["Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen", "Takeaway/sandwich shop"]
}

Everything in your patch, for territory planning

{
  "localAuthorities": ["cambridge", "peterborough"],
  "onlyWithCoordinates": true
}

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Example output

{
  "fhrsId": 1881081,
  "name": "Bodhi's Coffeeshop",
  "businessType": "Restaurant/Cafe/Canteen",
  "address": "2 The Green, Southwick, West Sussex",
  "postcode": "BN42 4DA",
  "localAuthority": "Adur",
  "region": "South East",
  "rating": "2",
  "ratingScore": 2,
  "ratingBand": "improvement_needed",
  "ratingDate": "2025-09-02",
  "daysSinceRating": 373,
  "isNewlyRegistered": false,
  "needsHelp": true,
  "latitude": 50.8317031860352,
  "longitude": -0.276165992021561,
  "councilEmail": "environmentalhealth@adur-worthing.gov.uk",
  "sourceUrl": "https://ratings.food.gov.uk/business/1881081",
  "source": "Food Standards Agency (FHRS)",
  "licence": "UK Open Government Licence v3.0"
}

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Who buys this

• Food-safety consultants and EHO trainers — the failure list is their entire pipeline.
• Commercial cleaning and pest control — same trigger, same urgency.
• EPOS, booking, and delivery platforms — new openings, before the competition arrives.
• Food and drink wholesalers — a new kitchen picks its suppliers once.
• Web designers and local marketing agencies — a new restaurant needs a site in week one.
• Insurance brokers and accountants — new business registrations.

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Pricing

Pay per delivered record. Filtered-out businesses cost you nothing — you are charged only for the leads that reach your dataset. A month's failures in one region is a few hundred records; the whole UK is 613,000, so use maxResults unless you mean it.

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Reliability

• Each of the 363 councils is fetched independently. If one is unavailable the sweep continues and the failure is recorded in the RUN_SUMMARY key-value record.
• Requests retry three times with backoff before an authority is given up on.
• Coordinates are parsed and bounds-checked rather than passed through, because the API returns them as strings and nulls.

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Data source and licence

All data comes from the Food Standards Agency's public FHRS API, published under the UK Open Government Licence v3.0, which permits commercial use with attribution. Every record carries its source, sourceUrl and licence.

What you pay for is the nationwide sweep, the trigger detection, the two-scheme normalisation and the maintenance — not the data itself, which is public. Assembling it across 363 councils is the product.

This Actor contains only business data: registered food premises and their public inspection results. No personal data.