About Local Health Inspections

What this site is

Local Health Inspections is an independent public-information project. Across Canada and parts of the United States, local health authorities inspect restaurants, grocery stores, and other food premises, and they publish the results — but each one does so on its own website, in its own format, and often behind a clunky search tool. Our job is to gather those published results, standardise them, and make them searchable and readable in one place. When you look up a facility here, you see the same findings the health authority released: the date of each inspection, the infractions recorded, and how they were resolved.

Where the data comes from

Every inspection on this site originates from an official public health source — a provincial ministry, a regional health unit, a county or city health department. We do not generate, estimate, or editorialise the findings. You can see the full list of areas we cover on our regions page, and each region page names the specific public health authority behind it and links to that authority's own disclosure site, which remains the authoritative record.

How we collect and update it

We use automated tools to read the results each authority publishes, then normalise them into a consistent structure — a facility, its location, and its inspection history — and load them into a single database that powers the search, map, and region pages. We re-check our sources on a recurring schedule and refresh facilities as new results are posted, so the site tracks the official record rather than a one-time snapshot. Because sources publish at different intervals and in different formats, how quickly a new inspection appears here varies by region.

How facilities are placed on the map

Many sources publish a facility's street address but no map coordinates. For those, we place the facility from its address using address data from OpenStreetMap contributors and from Statistics Canada's Open Database of Addresses, and we only accept an exact match on the civic number, street and community — a facility we cannot place with confidence is left off the map rather than guessed. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

What we don't do

We are not a health authority and we do not carry out inspections or assign our own grades — those judgments belong to the inspectors who visited the premises. We don't accept payment to add, remove, hide, or change a facility's results. The data is presented as published; where a site shows a score, placard, or pass/fail status, that reflects the source authority's own system, not ours.

How we summarise a result

To give each premises a quick pass/fail signal, where the health authority publishes its own result or grade (for example a pass/fail outcome, a letter grade, or a satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating), we use it. Otherwise we look at what the inspector found: an inspection with any higher-risk finding — one the authority flags as critical, or one about food temperatures, hand hygiene, pests, sanitizing, contamination or chemicals — counts as a fail; one with only lower-risk findings (upkeep, paperwork, training) counts as a pass with minor issues. Because some authorities record many small items on every visit, we never fail a premises just for the number of findings. The pass rate is the share of inspected premises whose most recent inspection passed.

Accuracy and corrections

We work to reproduce each source faithfully, but this site can only be as current and complete as the authority it draws from, and normalising many different formats can occasionally introduce an error. If a business has been re-inspected, has closed, or if you believe a record here is wrong, the official public health source is always the definitive reference. Spotted a mistake or a source we should add? Tell us through our contact page and we'll look into it.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, data requests, or coverage suggestions are all welcome. Reach us any time through the contact page.