The scheme aims to help people choose where to eat out or shop for food by providing information about the hygiene standards in restaurants, pubs, cafes, takeaways, hotels, supermarkets, and other places you eat out and buy food.
The aim is to reduce the one million cases of food poisoning suffered by people each year.
As more local authorities roll out the scheme over the coming months, more ratings will be published online.
Bright green and black food hygiene stickers showing a rating from zero to five will soon be a feature of shopping centres and high streets in the UK. The stickers will show how good the hygiene standards are at places where you can eat or buy food.
Following inspections by local council food safety officers, the hygiene standards are rated on a scale. At the top of the scale is ‘5’ – this means the hygiene standards are very good. At the bottom of the scale is ‘0’ – this means urgent improvement is required.
A different scheme, with similar aims, is being rolled out by local authorities in Scotland.
A snapshot survey recently carried out for the FSA indicated that more than eight in 10 members of the public (86%) consider hygiene standards to be extremely important when eating out, significantly outweighing other considerations such as price and location.
At least a fifth of people questioned said that they had, when eating out, sent food back for hygiene-related reasons, such as undercooked poultry (23%) and dirty plates (22%), increasing to around one in three who reported sending back undercooked meat (29%).
A spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency said that businesses will be given a new food hygiene rating each time their premises are inspected by the local authority. The frequency of these planned inspections depends on the risk to public health – the greater the risk, the more often the premises will be inspected. If the business gets a rating of ‘4’ or below, but then makes the improvements that the local authority identified as being necessary, they can request a revisit before the next planned inspection, so that the hygiene standards can be reassessed with a view to getting a new and higher food hygiene rating.
Each business can only have one revisit between the local authority’s planned inspections of the premises. At the revisit, the food safety officer will be looking at standards generally, not just at the specific areas the business has been working to improve, so the hygiene rating could well go down and not up.
Source: Food Standards Agency
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