Britain's Filthy Food

Last year a client representing Canxida, a food supplements company, reached out to me and was interested in hearing some ideas.

When I’m ideating, I feel like my subconscious does about half the work, and so the idea was stewing in my mind while I was picking up a post-pub snack one evening. I caught sight of the food hygiene rating in the window of my favourite chicken shop and was equally mortified and inspired.

I got to wondering… Just how many filthy meals are eaten in Britain every day?

Gathering Ratings

Ok, step 1: get a hygiene rating for every restaurant, takeaway, and other catering provider in Britain.

Step 2: figure out how many customers they each get

Step 3: do some quick maths

Step 1:

Good news & bad news.
The good news is the FHSA (UK Food Standards Agency) has a public API we can access.
The bad news is the addresses are entered manually by the establishments (more on this later).

But all in all not too difficult. I wrote an API request to get the data for every establishment which was categorised as a restaurant, café, takeaway, sandwich shop, or “other catering premises”. The dataset I had at the end was a list of theoretically every food retailer and their hygiene rating for the whole UK.

Step 2:

How can you tell how many customers go into every restaurant or takeaway in the whole UK? Spoiler: You can’t.

So this is where we need to get creative. What data can we get that might be a fair representation of the number of customers without diving down a rabbit hole and blowing the budget?

When all else fails, turn to Google.

It is suggested that 5-10% of customers leave Google reviews. If we estimate that these are distributed equally across the UK and its restaurants, we can find the percentage of restaurant meals and take-outs ordered from every single catering premises in the UK.

Then we need a source for how many meals are ordered and eaten by Brits each year, and we have our figures.

It’s a hypothesis that clearly won’t be 100% correct but will be close, and as long as it is made clear in the article that we are estimating, it can allow us to make some powerful statements.

So, we connect to the Google Places API to gather review data for our many, many restaurants.

Step 2.5:

Remember this?

Yeah.

So, the problem with this is that we are querying Google with the addresses and names of restaurants which have been typed in by a million random Brits. Surprise, surprise, there is a LOT of typos.

It required some wrangling, some extra searches, and some fuzzy matching, and we still weren’t able to find every single establishment on Google Places - though we did find over 98%.

So, hey, that’s our data set now.

Step 3:

We found sources(1)(2) claiming that Brits order a total of around 8.4 billion meals every year (restaurant & takeaway)

Divying these out to every restaurant, based on the number of Google reviews they each have, we found how many unclean(Hygiene rating 2/5), dirty(1/5), and filthy(0/5) meals are eaten in Britain every day.

And then we put it in a Canva graphic:

185 million meals per year from restaurants rated 2/5 or less, and 9.9 million meals per year from restaurants with a hygiene rating of 0.

Yuck.

Read more about it here, or the next stage in the campaign here - where I explored the filthiest food regions in the UK.