Yelp is broadening its partnership with Seattle-based food tech startup Hazel Analytics to expand health ratings on its platform, the company announced on Thursday. The two companies are working together to further expand Yelp’s health grades information on restaurant listings. Yelp first partnered with Hazel Analytics last year to display inspection details for restaurants on its platform.
Hazel Analytics now provides the hygiene data on nearly 700,000 Yelp pages, and lists information about health inspection jurisdictions representing nearly 70% of the U.S. population. This feature incorporates data from health departments across 48 states, up from four states previously. For the first time, the feature will bring Canadian health scores to Yelp, with data from Toronto and Vancouver.
“The expansion of Yelp’s health scores program comes at a time when people are returning to indoor dining as COVID-19 restrictions continue to lift, health inspections are bouncing back from the early pandemic pause, and restaurants continue to embrace diner safety measures like contactless payments and virtual menus,” the company said in a blog post about the announcement.
Hazel Analytics collects health scores from local health departments’ publicly available data. In instances where a health department doesn’t publish a score as part of its health inspection findings, Hazel Analytics uses underlying data to estimate a score based on a 100-point scoring system to show how a business’s latest inspection compares to others in the same jurisdiction.
“Since our founding, the mission of Hazel Analytics has been to improve public health by connecting food service businesses, regulators and consumers,” said Arash Nasibi, the co-founder and CEO at Hazel Analytics, in a statement. “After years of providing award-winning technology solutions to enterprise food safety professionals, we’re now excited to partner with Yelp to make it easier than ever for consumers to have access to local dining establishments’ public health inspection information.”
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