How the food hygiene rating scheme works

Find out how businesses are rated, how they can improve their score and where you can find local food hygiene ratings.

What the food hygiene rating scheme is

You have the right to know businesses' food hygiene standards. So, we make the results of food safety inspections publicly available.

Brighton & Hove is part of the national Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS).

How we rate a business's hygiene

We inspect food businesses to check that their hygiene standards meet legal requirements. 

We rate the hygiene standards on a scale of 0 (urgent improvement necessary) to 5 (very good).

Find out what happens during a food hygiene inspection.

After the inspection, we give food businesses a sticker which shows their rating. We encourage them to display it at the entrance of their business. Customers can then use this information to choose whether they want to buy food from there.

How often we do food safety inspections varies from every 6 months to every 3 years. We decide this based on the risk the food business poses. We use a nationally agreed-upon scoring process to calculate this risk.

We tell businesses their rating in writing within 14 days of an inspection. Businesses can appeal and have the right to give their view on the food hygiene rating.

Find out how to respond to your food hygiene rating if you think it's wrong.

If you've taken steps to improve your food hygiene, you can request a revisit.

Open data on food hygiene ratings

Anyone can use the food hygiene ratings information. For example, developers could use it for making apps.

Food businesses with more than one outlet can use it as a management tool to assess performance across their chain.

Find food hygiene rating scheme data through an application programming interface (API) in XML (this can be opened in Microsoft Excel) and JSON formats.

Find out more

We have put together some guidance documents to help you with your food hygiene inspection.

Join the conversation on X. The hashtag is #FHRS, and it's a good idea to mention @foodgov.

You can also visit the FHRS Facebook page.

If you can’t find the answers to your questions, contact our Food Safety Team: