Track Food Hygiene Rating Changes with Free Alerts
Get notified when a restaurant or takeaway's hygiene rating changes. HygieneScout monitors every food business in the UK daily and emails you when ratings are updated.
Food hygiene ratings can change at any time. After a routine inspection, a restaurant rated 5 might come back as a 3, or a takeaway that was struggling could jump up to a 4. The Food Standards Agency publishes these updates, but they don't send notifications. Unless you go back and search for the same business again, you'd never know the rating changed.
We built a few features to help with that.
Rating alerts: get emailed when a rating changes
Rating alerts are the simplest way to stay informed. Find any food business on HygieneScout, enter your email address on their page, and you'll get an email the next time their hygiene rating changes.
No account needed. No app to download. Just your email and one checkbox for consent. Each alert email includes the old rating, the new rating, and a link to the full listing. If you want to stop, every email has a one-click unsubscribe link.
How it works behind the scenes
HygieneScout syncs with the Food Standards Agency every day at 3am. We check all 390+ local authorities for updated ratings. When we detect a change, we capture a snapshot of the old and new rating, then send an email to anyone watching that business.
This daily sync is also how we build our recently changed page and the rating history timelines on individual establishment pages.
Recently changed ratings
Not sure which business to watch? The recently changed page shows the latest rating changes across the whole UK. You can filter by direction to see only improvements, or browse the full list. It updates daily and is a useful way to spot patterns in your area.
Rating history on every business page
Every establishment page on HygieneScout includes a rating timeline showing how the business's score has changed over time. This is something the FSA doesn't offer. Their website only shows the current rating, with no context about what came before.
We started capturing snapshots when HygieneScout launched, and the dataset grows every day. Over time, this will give a detailed picture of how food hygiene standards move across the country. For now, it already shows recent changes and helps put a current rating in context.
Who is this useful for?
A few examples of people who might find rating alerts helpful:
- Parents keeping an eye on cafes and takeaways near their children's school.
- Regular customers of a favourite restaurant who want to stay informed.
- Business owners monitoring their own rating after a recent inspection.
- Local journalists tracking food hygiene trends in their area.
- Environmental health professionals who want a quick view of changes across their authority.
What makes this different from the FSA website?
The Food Standards Agency does a great job of publishing ratings as open data. But their public website is designed for one-off lookups, not ongoing monitoring. There's no way to subscribe to changes, no history, and no way to compare areas or chains over time.
HygieneScout adds three things on top of the raw data:
- Daily change detection across all 390+ local authorities.
- Historical snapshots so you can see how ratings have moved, not just where they are today.
- Email alerts so you don't have to check manually.
All of this is free and built on the same open data the FSA publishes under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Start watching a business
Search for any restaurant, takeaway, or food business and set up a free alert in seconds.