Food Standards Agency data now live: 17 new food hygiene tests
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is now Senserity's 26th data source. We have ingested the full Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) dataset for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, along with the Food Hygiene Information Scheme (FHIS) dataset for Scotland, covering approximately 599,000 food establishments across the whole of the UK. On top of that data, we have built 17 new automated tests that assess food safety compliance, hygiene standards, and inspection history for any company linked to food operations.
If your organisation buys from, partners with, or acquires companies that handle food at any point in their operations, these tests give you visibility into a risk area that traditional due diligence often misses entirely.
Why food hygiene data matters for due diligence
Every business in the UK that manufactures, processes, stores, distributes, or sells food is legally required to register with their local authority under Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. That registration feeds into the FSA's national database, and the resulting hygiene ratings are one of the few public, standardised indicators of how well a business manages basic operational standards.
A food hygiene rating is not just a sticker on a takeaway window. It reflects a local authority inspector's assessment of three distinct areas: how hygienically food is handled (preparation, cooking, reheating, cooling, storage), the physical condition of the premises (cleanliness, layout, lighting, ventilation, pest control), and the confidence the inspector has in the business's food safety management systems (documentation, training, hazard controls). Each of those areas is scored independently, and the scores are combined into an overall rating from 0 (urgent improvement necessary) to 5 (very good). In Scotland, the Food Hygiene Information Scheme (FHIS) uses a simpler pass/improvement required/exempt framework, and Senserity handles both schemes.
For procurement and compliance teams, this data answers questions that financial accounts and credit checks cannot. A supplier might have a healthy balance sheet and a clean Companies House record, but if their food handling facilities have scored a 1 (major improvement necessary) at their last inspection, that is a material operational risk worth knowing about before you sign a supply agreement.
What the 17 tests check
The new tests span five of Senserity's risk categories: compliance, operational, social/ESG, derived, and cross-category. Here is what they cover, grouped by the type of question they answer.
Registration and compliance status. COM-090 checks whether a company has any linked FSA establishments at all. For companies operating in food-relevant SIC codes (food manufacturing, wholesale food, food retail, accommodation, food service activities), the absence of any FSA record is a potential compliance gap. COM-091 flags any linked establishment with a hygiene rating of 2 or below. COM-092 identifies establishments that are awaiting their first inspection, and COM-093 flags those where a reinspection has been requested but not yet carried out.
Operational detail. OPS-060 provides the headline summary: how many linked establishments, their rating distribution, and the weighted average score. OPS-061 breaks down the three FSA sub-scores (hygiene, structural, and management confidence) so you can see whether a poor overall rating is driven by dirty premises, poor documentation, or both. OPS-062 charts the rating distribution across all linked sites, useful for multi-site operators where the average might mask a problem at one location. OPS-063 surfaces the single worst-rated establishment, because a chain with 50 five-rated sites and one zero-rated site has a different risk profile from one with 51 three-rated sites. OPS-064 checks how recently each establishment was inspected. OPS-065 calculates a consistency score across all sites, flagging businesses where ratings vary widely between locations. OPS-066 profiles the types of food business (restaurant, takeaway, retailer, manufacturer, school caterer) linked to the company. OPS-067 maps the geographic spread of linked establishments. OPS-068 reports whether the company's establishments fall under the FHRS numeric rating scheme or the Scottish FHIS pass/fail scheme. OPS-069 flags the proportion of establishments that are exempt from rating (typically very low-risk activities like vending machines or newsagents selling only pre-packaged food).
Food safety as an ESG indicator. SOC-070 synthesises the FSA data into a single food safety standards score for the social/ESG category. It applies a weighted scoring model with penalties for low-rated establishments, giving a composite view of whether the company takes food safety seriously across its operations.
Change detection. DRV-072 monitors for rating changes between assessment runs. If a linked establishment's hygiene rating drops (or rises), Senserity detects it and raises an alert. Rating downgrades are flagged at high severity, while upgrades are informational.
Cross-category coherence. XCC-015 compares FSA ratings against ISO 22000 (food safety management) certification status. A company that holds ISO 22000 but has poorly rated FSA establishments, or one with excellent ratings but no formal food safety management certification, presents a coherence gap that may warrant investigation.
Which plans include FSA data
Six of the 17 tests are available on the free tier: FSA Registration Status (COM-090), Low Hygiene Rating Alert (COM-091), Food Hygiene Rating Summary (OPS-060), Worst-Case Establishment (OPS-063), Inspection Recency (OPS-064), and Food Safety Standards Rating (SOC-070). That means any Senserity user can check whether a company has food hygiene concerns without paying anything.
The remaining tests, covering sub-score breakdowns, rating distributions, consistency analysis, business type profiling, geographic spread, and change detection, are available from the Starter tier upward. The ISO 22000 coherence check (XCC-015) requires the Professional tier.
How Senserity links FSA data to companies
The FSA dataset identifies food establishments by name and postcode, not by company number. Linking those records to the correct company in the Companies House register is a non-trivial matching problem, particularly for large operators (a single pub chain or supermarket group may have hundreds of separately registered establishments).
Senserity uses a three-pass vendor linking approach: first matching on postcode and name similarity using trigram scoring, then exact name matching, then normalised name matching that strips common suffixes (Limited, Ltd, PLC) and standardises punctuation. The initial load linked establishments across hundreds of thousands of companies, and the weekly refresh picks up new registrations, closures, and rating changes from the FSA's bulk data feed.
What to do next
If you already have companies on your watchlist, the FSA tests will run automatically on the next scheduled assessment. You do not need to do anything to enable them. Companies with linked food establishments will show FSA results in their risk profile under the compliance, operational, and social categories.
If you are evaluating Senserity for the first time, the free tier includes six FSA tests alongside the full suite of Companies House, sanctions, and public register checks. Add a company in a food-relevant sector and the FSA data will appear alongside everything else.