Guest Blog by Glynne Townsend, Partner and COO of HD Scores
My son has a peanut allergy and like many allergy sufferers, eating out is a nerve-racking experience. Despite the waitress assurances that the kitchen will prepare a meal diligently you have no real idea how well the kitchen is managed to be able to do so, well, you do now.
Tired of restaurant anxiety, six years ago a group of us got together and started to build a company that would later become HD Scores (www.HDScores.com). The nation’s first hygiene review system of places where we all eat; restaurants, schools, drive throughs, health clubs etc. We provide a simple percentage score, the higher the score the cleaner the restaurant.
We achieve this by utilizing the local health department inspection scores from across the nation, scraping data from their websites weekly and running them through a proprietary algorithm. By doing so we come up with a hygiene score that reflects a restaurants violation history (not just the latest inspection), one that penalizes for repeat offences and critical violations and ranks restaurants within a local jurisdiction, so our users can make an actionable decision of the safest places to eat when they go out.
We now provide inspection data for over 1.3M establishments across the USA and cover 90% of the metropolitan population. In June last year we launched our service with Yelp providing Yelp users either jurisdictional health scores or our hygiene score in its absence for restaurants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Florida, Dallas and California. The launch was Yelp’s biggest ever site upgrade, generating over 1.3B media hits and a wave of TV reports and news articles from Fortune magazine to Jimmy Fallon. The support for food safety from the public was staggering. This led us to launch our own APP in December that allows everyone to access our database, search establishments based on hygiene and food safety and choose a dining experience that is not only fun but safe. Unfortunately using HD Scores does not guarantee an allergy event will not happen when you eat out. It does however provide you with the peace of mind that where you are eating performs to the highest standards of health hygiene available and when you are told, ‘the kitchen will take care of it’ they probably will.
Tired of restaurant anxiety, six years ago a group of us got together and started to build a company that would later become HD Scores (www.HDScores.com). The nation’s first hygiene review system of places where we all eat; restaurants, schools, drive throughs, health clubs etc. We provide a simple percentage score, the higher the score the cleaner the restaurant.
We achieve this by utilizing the local health department inspection scores from across the nation, scraping data from their websites weekly and running them through a proprietary algorithm. By doing so we come up with a hygiene score that reflects a restaurants violation history (not just the latest inspection), one that penalizes for repeat offences and critical violations and ranks restaurants within a local jurisdiction, so our users can make an actionable decision of the safest places to eat when they go out.
We now provide inspection data for over 1.3M establishments across the USA and cover 90% of the metropolitan population. In June last year we launched our service with Yelp providing Yelp users either jurisdictional health scores or our hygiene score in its absence for restaurants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Florida, Dallas and California. The launch was Yelp’s biggest ever site upgrade, generating over 1.3B media hits and a wave of TV reports and news articles from Fortune magazine to Jimmy Fallon. The support for food safety from the public was staggering. This led us to launch our own APP in December that allows everyone to access our database, search establishments based on hygiene and food safety and choose a dining experience that is not only fun but safe. Unfortunately using HD Scores does not guarantee an allergy event will not happen when you eat out. It does however provide you with the peace of mind that where you are eating performs to the highest standards of health hygiene available and when you are told, ‘the kitchen will take care of it’ they probably will.
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