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 the food hygiene standards of businesses. 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' 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 if 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 posed by the food business. We use a nationally agreed 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 Excel) and JSON formats.
Find out the reasons a food business may not have a food hygiene rating.
Find out more
We have put together some guidance documents to help you with your food hygiene inspection.
Join the conversation on Twitter. The hashtag is #FHRS, and it's a good idea for tweets to mention @foodgov.
You can also visit the FHRS Facebook page.
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the FHRS.
If you can’t find the answers to your questions, please contact our Food Safety Team by phone 01273 294 416 or send an email to ehl.food@brighton-hove.gov.uk.