We use the national Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) to display the hygiene standards of food businesses.
Ratings are available for anyone to view on the Food Standards Agency website. Food businesses are given a door/window sticker that they are encouraged to display at the entrance to their premises.
How a food business is rated
Food outlets, such as restaurants, cafes, takeaways and pubs, are inspected by Environmental Health Officers in order to check that their hygiene standards meet legal requirements. They make an assessment of the conditions found at these inspections and score them on a scale endorsed by the FSA.
The scores given for hygiene, structure and management are used to calculate a rating for the business, from zero at the bottom (which means ‘urgent improvement is necessary’) to a top rating of five (‘very good’).
The ratings give consumers a glimpse of what is going on in the kitchen when they eat out, or behind the scenes at the place where they shop. Around one million people suffer from food poisoning every year and the aim of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) in developing the FHRS is to reduce this number.