One source: the Food Standards Agency's published food hygiene rating data. No scraped directories, no bought lists, no enrichment vendors.
The phone numbers and email addresses shown against some leads don't come from this register and aren't in the table below — they're read from the business's own public website, located using a single Google Places lookup per business. We store only that lookup's Place ID, the contact detail itself, and the page it came from; we never buy, scrape, or subscribe to a third-party contact list, and the FSA data below never carries a phone number or email in the first place.
| Publisher | Food Standards Agency |
|---|---|
| Data | Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) and Food Hygiene Information Scheme (FHIS) open data |
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Coverage | 0 local authorities |
| Collected | Daily, one authority at a time, no faster than one request per second |
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the Food Standards Agency or any local authority.
Business name, trading address, postcode, business type, hygiene rating, the date of the inspection behind it, and — in England, Wales and Northern Ireland — separate hygiene, structural and management confidence scores.
Email addresses. Telephone numbers. Owner or director names. Registration dates. Anyone offering you those "from hygiene data" is getting them from somewhere else and should tell you where.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland use FHRS: a 0 to 5 rating, where 5 is best, plus three component scores where lower is better. Scotland uses FHIS: Pass, Improvement Required, or Pass and Eat Safe, with no numeric rating and no component scores at all.
We handle them separately everywhere it matters. A trigger that depends on a numeric fall simply cannot fire in Scotland, and we say so on the territory page rather than quietly showing a smaller number.
We check every authority daily. But councils upload to the FSA on their own schedules — in one national collection we measured publication dates spread across six days — so the published data is the constraint, not our collection. Every figure we show you carries the date it was measured.
The register publishes only current state, with no registration date. A new business is therefore visible only as a premises that is in today's register and was not in yesterday's, which means it is detectable only by keeping both.
That method has a known failure mode we guard against explicitly. Councils sometimes reissue their internal identifiers — during an ownership change, or a back-office system migration — and at row level a thousand reissued identifiers look exactly like a thousand new businesses. When a council's daily change exceeds what a real registration rate could produce, or when the appearances arrive already carrying a full inspection rating (a genuinely new business has not been inspected yet), the whole batch is quarantined and never posted. Not reviewed and released — never posted.
All of this rests on a separate archive that keeps a dated, unaltered copy of what each register published on each day, addressed by the hash of its own content. AutoPitch can only read it. That is what makes "the rating was 2 on this date" a checkable claim rather than an assertion.