Scores on the doors for your local takeaways

We often hear something like "I've been ordering from the same takeaway for years", but have you really checked the food hygiene rating for the place? The food might taste good, but it might be on a verge of going horribly wrong for your health. There's many ways of finding the hygiene ratings for takeaways and probably the best one would be going to the Food Standards Agency website direct: https://ratings.food.gov.uk/. However it might not always be the easiest place to find the information you need.

Food Standards Agency operates two different schemes for rating cleanliness of food preparation establishments. One is called "Food Hygiene Rating Scheme" and is being ran by local councils in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The other one is operational in Scotland only and is called "Food Hygiene Information Scheme". There's one major difference between the two. In Scotland your local takeaway might get a "Pass" or "Improvement necessary" rating while the other scheme hands out a numeric score from zero to five. With zero obviously being the worst possible score and would indicate that you should avoid this place at all cost.