Three months ago, we ran a survey amongst our users and found that 86% of them would prefer dining at, or ordering in from restaurants that have transparent food hygiene standards. Moreover, 93% users gave more weightage to wanting to eat at/ order in from a hygienic place – that is, given a choice, they would rather go to a place that they know is clean and hygienic, over a place which serves food that tastes just great.

The interesting thing is that while most of our users clearly and strongly care about food hygiene at restaurants, they don’t know, or have a trusted source that tells them – whether a particular restaurant is hygienic and follows prescribed food hygiene standards for the well being of their customers.

To address this need-gap, and to better educate our users, we are excited to introduce Food Hygiene Ratings for restaurants listed on Zomato.

Zomato will only act as an organiser of these Food Hygiene Ratings for the industry. We do not believe that we are the experts in food hygiene, therefore, we will work with accredited third party auditors – who are experts in their field and will conduct surprise physical food hygiene audits at participating restaurants.

These audits will check whether they meet various aspects of the food hygiene – e.g. how is the food handled, does the restaurant have separate cooking spaces for vegetarian and non-vegetarian items, the basic cleanliness level of the restaurant, and how the business manages what it does; i.e. to make sure food is prepared and served in a clean environment.

Here’s a small section of our food hygiene audit checklist – 

Food Hygiene standards found at the time of an audit will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5 – where 1 would denote an urgent need for improvement, and 5 would denote high standards of food hygiene at the premises. It’s rather simple – higher ratings mean better food hygiene standards.

To begin with, we are launching this initiative in the UAE and Australia. Our current goal is that in our learning phase upto March 2018, we will help provide food hygiene ratings for about 1,000 restaurants in the UAE and 3,000 in Australia. We have also started thinking along these lines for India, and are working with stakeholders from the restaurant industry as well as regulatory bodies to ensure that we can all use each other’s strengths to improve the overall perception and reality of the restaurant industry.

This is how the food hygiene ratings will be integrated into the Zomato app.

As the Food Hygiene Ratings initiative gains traction over the next few months, you will see more and more restaurants with these rating on the Zomato platform. And if your favourite restaurant doesn’t have a food hygiene rating on Zomato in a few months, it should give you something to think about.

If you have any ideas about what we need to watch out for as we jump into doing this, or any suggestions on how to improve this initiative, please let us know at hygiene@zomato.com