Safe Eats Methodology

Safe Eats shows Florida health-inspection results for licensed food service establishments in all 67 Florida counties. It publishes only what the state's own records support. This page says exactly what that means, and where it stops.

Where the data comes from

Two files published by the Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation (DBPR), fetched directly from the state:

• hrfood1.csv … hrfood7.csv — currently licensed establishments, one file per DBPR district
• 1fdinspi.csv … 7fdinspi.csv — inspections, likewise

All fourteen files are read every week and every Florida county is kept. The district a file covers is not the same thing as a county: seven counties have their restaurants split across two district files, so filtering by county on the state's own county code is the only way to get a complete one. Nothing is scraped, and no third party sits between the state's file and this map.

If the source breaks, this site stops rather than lies. The loader refuses a file that is not CSV, that begins with an HTML document, or that carries implausibly few rows — and leaves the previous data and its date untouched. The earlier version of this project did not do that: its download URL died in January 2023, the failure was written to a log instead of stopping the run, and it served three-year-old records as current. The date in the corner of every page is the date of the last successful load, never today's date.

How an inspection becomes a signal

Each inspection ends with a disposition — the state's own words for the outcome. Every disposition is mapped explicitly to one of four signals. An unrecognised disposition stops the build rather than defaulting to a passing result, because a silent default is how a change in someone else's file becomes a false reassurance about a kitchen.

An establishment shows the signal of its most recent visit. Where an inspector returned to check on earlier violations, it is that later visit that counts — a warning cleared on a callback is a resolved problem, not a current one.

A worked example

Here is the case that most often gets reported wrongly elsewhere. One inspection case can contain several visits, and it is the last visit that holds the outcome:

The inspector issued a warning, returned, granted an extension, then returned again and found the problems fixed. This establishment shows “Met standards”, dated 20 July. Reporting the original warning would describe a problem that has already been resolved — the restaurant did what it was asked to do, and the record says so.

The panel still lists all three visits, so you can see the sequence rather than just the conclusion.

Why most places say “no recent inspection”

The inspection file DBPR publishes runs from the start of the state fiscal year, 1 July, and grows as inspections happen. It is not a full history, and older years are not published anywhere we can reach.

So most licensed establishments have no published inspection yet. They are shown in grey, and grey means exactly one thing: the state has not published a visit here within the period we hold. It is not a poor result, a warning, or a hint. Florida inspects licensed food service one to four times a year depending on assessed risk, so this fills in over time.

How pins are placed

Each establishment's licensed address is converted to coordinates once, by the US Census Bureau geocoder, and the result is stored. Nothing about a pin is looked up from a mapping service when you load this page, and no establishment is matched by name against anyone else's database — the pin and the inspection record are the same record.

An establishment with no usable coordinate is left off the map rather than placed at a guess such as a ZIP-code centre. A pin in roughly the right area is worse than no pin, because it looks equally confident.

Accuracy is checked county by county: a random sample of 100 mapped establishments is drawn with a fixed seed and each one is verified by hand against aerial imagery, with at least 99 required to fall within 50 metres. The threshold is set before the sample is drawn, and the sample is not redrawn to obtain a better number. Counties with 100 or fewer mapped establishments are checked in full rather than sampled.

Counties are checked separately because they are not alike where it matters: over half of Miami-Dade's addresses use the Miami street grid, where “NW 7 ST” and “NW 7 AVE” both exist and one wrong character lands miles away, against about 6% of Palm Beach's. A result in one county says very little about another, so it is not borrowed.

Most counties have not been checked yet. Their establishments are still shown — the inspection record is the state's either way — and each one says so on its own record rather than leaving you to assume a check that has not happened. The table below is the current state of that work.

What this does not show, and why

Individual violation descriptions

The published file records violations as bare numbers with no accompanying text, and the state's per-inspection detail page no longer resolves. We show the counts in DBPR's own severity tiers — high priority, intermediate, basic — and stop there. Writing our own description of what violation “03” means at a named restaurant would be inventing an accusation.

Food trucks, caterers, temporary events and vending machines

These are licensed at a commissary, base or home address rather than where food reaches you. Mapping them would put a restaurant pin on a residential street and assert something the licence record does not support.

Ratings, photos, reviews and opening hours

Not inspection data. Mixing them in would blur the line between what the state found and what the internet thinks.

What an inspection result is not

An inspection is one inspector's findings during one visit on one day. It is not a score, not a grade, and not a statement about the food you will be served. A restaurant with violations may have corrected them the same afternoon; one with a clean record may have been inspected months ago. Read the date alongside the result — that is why every result here carries one.

Corrections

If a pin is in the wrong place or a record looks wrong, the authoritative copy is the state's. Inspection records are corrected by DBPR, not by us, and a correction there reaches this map on the next load. DBPR Hotels and Restaurants inspections →