Find out how clean your local restaurant or shop is
Or not, as very few food sites are checked each year and new website may be of limited use
Hygiene tests on restaurants, supermarkets, canteens and abbatoirs are being published online from today but the information given is limited to a smiley of various grades turning into a grimace.
Four levels of smiley are shown for Very Good, Good, Could do Better and Fix Immediately – which equals the shop or restaurant being shut until improvements are made.
A smartphone app is also being made available to give the results shown on the Alim’confiance website but the results do not give any indication of the quality of the food, just how clean it is.
Fany Molin of the Ministry of Agriculture said that only the Fix Immediately grade implied a risk to public health and any establishments receiving this grade would be closed. Others would be given time to improve.
In reality, few restaurants and shops are checked each year – just 60,000 out of the million or so possible – and the site shows even fewer at the moment (about 1,500) as only results of tests from last month are being made available. Results are wiped after a year.
The hotel and restaurant federation GNI-Synhorcat is unhappy with the project, although they were involved in putting it together.
They told journalists the grades would hurt a restaurant for having one “off” day when there was nothing serious enough to force it to close. They said there were too few hygiene checks with Paris sites only being checked every three or four years and in every 10 years in the rest of the country. Checks needed to be done each year to be effective and for the hygiene grading to work.
The main federation, UMIH, said the grades were the last thing the hotel and restaurant industry needed with turnover down 3% but said it would have preferred a two-level system: either the site met standards and could stay open or it did not and should be closed until improvements were made.
One of the UMIH leaders, Hubert Jan, told Le Monde: “If the storage, the handling of food, training of staff is perfect a simple fault on the tiled floor can downgrade the level from Very Good to Good as was shown in tests in Paris and Avignon.”
He feared that tourist websites would lift the grades and use them online “branding us forever” with that grade.
Last year, just 1% of the 55,000 sites tested was judged to have failed and was closed – and only 9% were rated Could Do Better.
