Coming Soon to Yelp: Health-Inspection Ratings for Philly Restaurants
If you use Yelp to help you decide on a restaurant for date night, you’ll soon notice a new line item among the data provided for each business: a health-inspection grade. It’s a new feature the website rolled out late last week in partnership with the cities of San Francisco and New York, where the first health-grade data will be available. Philly’s hygiene ratings are “coming soon,” according to Yelp’s website, along with Boston and Chicago.
The scores are displayed as a number between 0 and 100; the higher the score, the better. When a user clicks on a score, Yelp gives a breakdown of health violations and dates of inspection.
Put bluntly, the idea is basically to shame restaurants into improving their hygiene practices. In a statement about the new data, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman cites two studies which found that providing consumers with better access to health-inspection grades results in fewer illnesses and better hygiene practices across the board.
No word yet on when Philly’s ratings will be available. But if you want to see how it works, check out this page for San Fran restaurant The Cheese Steak Shop.
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