The London-Middlesex Health Unit launched it's Food Inspection website yesterday. I had to take a look at my favorite restaurants (you can search by first letter or name) and was pleased to discover that the majority of them did not have any 'critical' or 'noncritical' infractions listed.
Critical infractions are those that could lead to food borne illness, while noncritical infractions are those that impact the sanitary condition of the establishment.
I copied all of the MLHU data into an excel sheet and did some number crunching (the pie chart shows the number of critical infractions).
Out of the 1863 places in London where food is served, the great majority (75%) did not have any critical or noncritical infractions listed (79% do not have any critical infractions and 72% did not have any noncritical infractions listed).
Roughly 15% of premises had one critical and one noncritical infraction (just under 300 places). 98 had 2 critical infractions, 26 had 3, 6 had 4, and 3 had 5.
For non-critical infractions, 131 premises had 2, 55 had 3, 26 had 4, 11 had 5, 3 had 6, 3 had 7, and 1 had 8 (in other words, only 5% of places had 3 or more non-critical infractions listed).
Keep in mind that these numbers include ALL places where food is served, not just restaurants.
I think it's great that the public has access to this information. My question is, would seeing an infraction online prevent you from checking out a restaurant or returning? Do you want restaurants to post signs in their windows showing that they've passed their last inspection (apparently this is in the works at city hall currently)?
As I mentioned, some of my favorite places had infractions listed. Because I've never had a bad experience or gotten sick at those places, knowing that they didn't meet all of the food inspection criteria at a certain point last year isn't going to stop me from patronizing them. Why? Not all infractions are equally worrisome in my opinion. For instance, I wouldn't want to eat at a place where food handlers aren't washing their hands, but I'm less worried about places not using a thermometer to check the tempurature of the food.
http://www.lfpress.com/news/london/2010/02/18/12929086.html#/news/london/2010/02/18/pf-12929086.html
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/02/11/12833456-sun.html
