Yelp users can soon see more restaurant health ratings

Yelp users will now have access to thousands of restaurant health inspection scores.

The feature will be added thanks to a partnership with Hazel Analytics — a Seattle-based food tech company, according a March 31 Yelp news release.

Hazel Analytics scrapes “hygiene data” from health departments across 48 states, and from two cities in Canada, Vancouver and Toronto. The new partnership will bring health score data to nearly 700,000 Yelp pages, a significant increase from Yelp’s previous programs.

Easy access to health inspection scores could mean a decrease in foodborne illnesses. Hospitalizations in Los Angeles County in the early 2000s dropped by 13% after restaurants were required to display their health inspection grades, Yelp said in the release.

A 2019 study in Minnesota also found that 94% of people said they wanted better access to inspection information and 77% said they would use the information to make a decision about where to eat.

Yelp users will be able to find health scores on a restaurant’s page under the “Info” section on the app or under “Amenities and more” on a website.

The goal of this new feature is for restaurants to have better hygiene and customers to make more informed decisions, with improved public outcomes and a revenue increase for restaurants that are cleaner, according to Hazel Analytics.

Yelp users will also be able to click on the health score and read further about the rating from the local health department.

“After years of providing award-winning technology solutions to enterprise food safety professionals, we’re now excited to partner with Yelp to make it easier than ever for consumers to have access to local dining establishments’ public health inspection information,” Hazel Analytics CEO and co-founder Arash Nasibi said in the release.

The partnership with Hazel Analytics is an expansion of Yelp’s Local Inspector Value-entry Specification, called LIVES.

The program first started in San Francisco and New York in 2013, and it showed users a restaurant’s health score and past violations. Local health departments sent Yelp inspection data from different restaurants before it was published on a Yelp business page, a Yelp spokesperson told McClatchy News.

But the program only reached four states and 11 counties. Those states included California, Colorado, Texas and North Carolina, the spokesperson said.

Hazel Analytics fixes this problem by collecting public data from local health departments and estimating a health score with underlying data when it’s not readily available.