The verification pipeline
Four steps, no shortcuts. Every restaurant on SafeEats™ passes through all of them.
Direct from the source
Every score comes straight from official government health department APIs and open-data portals — not scraped HTML, not a third-party aggregator, not an AI guess. We connect to the same databases the inspectors use.
Live refresh, not a snapshot
Our backend re-queries each jurisdiction's live endpoint when you search. When a restaurant is reinspected, the new grade shows up here — not months later from a stale export someone downloaded once.
Every record is traceable
Each restaurant profile links back to the exact official record it came from. One tap takes you to the health department page so you can verify the score yourself. No black box, no 'trust us.'
Normalized, not invented
Different counties grade differently — points, letter grades, pass/fail, demerits. We translate each system into a single 0–100 scale using documented, per-jurisdiction rules. We never fabricate a number.
Stale data is just as bad as wrong data
A restaurant can go from an A to a C overnight. Here's how we make sure you're not reading last year's grade.
On-demand live queries
When you search a restaurant, we hit the health department's live API in real time — not a cached snapshot from last quarter.
Stale-data warnings
If the most recent inspection on record is older than typical for that jurisdiction, we flag it openly with a banner instead of hiding the date.
Official endpoints only
We list every data source and its government portal link on our Coverage page. No mystery feeds, no resold data, no scraped PDFs dressed up as 'live.'
Why our sources are more reliable
The difference between a verified grade and a rip-off artist's guess.
Verify it yourself — that's the whole point
Every restaurant profile on SafeEats™ carries a "Verified Source" badge and a direct link to the official health department record. We don't expect you to take our word for it. We built the tools so you don't have to.