Algoma Public Health is the public health agency in my area that inspects restaurants to ensure they are abiding by all the relevant food safety legislation. They are also nice enough to publish their restaurant health inspection reports online for anyone to review.
I searched for a few restaurants that I frequent (phew Fratellis is safe!) but then I wanted to know which restaurants had the most health infractions?
Their website isn’t setup to answer that kind of question. Each inspection report is published as a unique page on their website which makes aggregating and comparing difficult.
I used rvest to scrape the URLs of all the reports APH published. Then I scraped the contents of the reports so that I could create a dataset that would allow me to aggregate and compare the results (the dataset and code available here.)
Restaurants with the most infractions
Of the 90% of restaurants who received three visits, here are the top 5 in terms of total number of infractions:
Surprising results. Upper Deck has some particularly bad health infractions.
But that got me thinking–not all infractions are equal. Some are minor and are corrected onsite. Some are more serious and others still are downright strange. Let’s take a closer look.
Number of infractions
Here are the top 10 infractions by frequency, meaning these infractions appear most often in the dataset.
Stranger Infractions
The infractions that don’t appear frequently are also quite interesting. Here are infractions that only appear once in the dataset, but leave me with more questions than answers.
| Restaurant | Address | Date | Infraction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Juicy Beatz & Healthy Eatz | 235 McNabb Street | 2017-08-23 | Food handler hygiene |
| Pauline’s Place | 923 Queen Street | 2017-11-28 | Only Grade A or B eggs permitted |
| Queen West Variety | 602 Queen Street | 2016-12-16 | Exclusion of live animals on the premises, subject to exemptions |
| Roberta Bondar Pavilion Serving Kitchens | 65 Foster Dr | 2016-08-30 | No room with food used for sleeping purposes |
| Teen Challenge Kitchen | 1446 Great Northern Road | 2016-12-13 | Uninspected meats obtained through hunting: only for custom cutting, wash/rinse/sanitize equipment after use as prescribed |
Questions that come to mind:
- who’s sleeping in the Pavilion?
- did the Teen Challenge involve catching your meal?
- what kind of animals are hanging out in Queen West Variety?
- how does one tell the grade of eggs? Can you do it just by looking?
What does this data tell us? Not too much really :)
I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the health inspection curtain. The dataset and code are available here. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in touch.