How is your Food Hygiene Rating even calculated? Is it a mysterious number that gets plucked out of thin air? In this short advice article we’re going to be de-mystifying the illusive food safety scores and explaining how you can ensure you get a 5* food hygiene score everytime!
So, let’s get started! When it comes to your Food Hygiene Rating, your inspector is looking at three important things:
- how hygienically the food is handled,
- the condition of the premises structure, and
- confidence in management and documentation.
A score of between 0 -25 and 0 -30 is given for each of these criteria and the final Food Hygiene Rating given depends on how well you do overall. As you can see from the table above, ‘confidence in management and documentation’ is the most heavily weighted element and therefore can have the greatest impact on the score you receive. Unlike in a ‘normal exam’, the goal here is to score as low as possible, with a higher score resulting in a poor hygiene rating.
