Compare Food Hygiene Ratings Across UK Chains, Towns, and Councils

The Food Standards Agency publishes hygiene ratings for every inspected food business in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But the official site only lets you search one business at a time. There's no way to compare chains against each other, or see how your town stacks up against the rest of the country.

That's what we built HygieneScout to do. Here's a quick tour of the tools we've put together.

Chain ratings: 49 brands compared

We track food hygiene ratings for 49 major UK chains, from McDonald's and Greggs to Nando's, Costa, and Wagamama. For each chain, you can see:

• The average rating across all their UK locations
• How many locations hold a 5-star rating
• The full rating distribution (how many at each level)
• Which towns each chain operates in

You can also drill into a specific chain in a specific town. For example, if you want to see how every Nando's in Manchester is rated, there's a page for that. We generate these pages for every chain-town combination where the chain has locations, which adds up to over 16,500 pages across the site.

Town rankings: how does your area compare?

Our rankings page lists UK towns ordered by their average food hygiene rating. You can sort by average rating or by the percentage of establishments that hold a 5-star score.

The top of the table is full of smaller coastal and rural towns where almost every food business is rated 5. Larger cities tend to sit a little further down the table, which is typical for areas with higher volumes of food businesses and more frequent staff turnover.

We also rank local councils, so you can compare how different authorities perform. Browse the full list on the councils page.

Most improved towns

One of our favourite features is the "most improved" section on the rankings page. HygieneScout captures a snapshot of every rating change during our daily sync with the FSA. Over the past 90 days, we can calculate which towns have seen the most rating improvements.

This is data you can't find on the FSA website. They publish current ratings, but not the history. By tracking changes over time, we can surface trends that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Browse by town

Every town in our database has its own page with a full list of food businesses, a rating distribution chart, and filters for business type. You can narrow it down to just restaurants in Manchester, or takeaways in Brighton, or any other combination.

We also generate pages for specific rating levels within a town. Want to see every 5-star business in Leeds? Or filter by business type and rating together? Those pages exist too.

London gets special treatment. Because London is made up of 33 boroughs, the London page shows aggregate stats across all boroughs, with links to each individual borough page.

See what changed recently

The recently changed page shows the latest rating changes across the UK. You can filter to see only improvements or see the full list. It updates daily.

If you spot a place you want to keep an eye on, you can set up a free rating alert to get emailed when their rating changes next.

All built on open data

Everything on HygieneScout is built from publicly available data published by the Food Standards Agency under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We sync daily to keep ratings current, and we capture historical snapshots to track how ratings change over time.

Start exploring: browse chains, view rankings, or search for a specific business.