How CleanPlate's grading works
Our methodology: where the data comes from, how different systems are normalized, and what we will never do.
Every grade on CleanPlate comes from an official government inspection record — a city, county, or state health authority. We operate no inspectors, collect no reviews, and accept no payment from restaurants for placement or grades. This page explains exactly what happens between the official record and what you see.
One honest scale
Jurisdictions summarize inspections differently — letter grades, 0–100 scores, demerit points, placards, pass/fail results. CleanPlate maps each system onto one comparable vocabulary: A, B, C where letters exist; PASS, CONDITIONAL, FAIL elsewhere; CLOSED when a permit is suspended. The original score always displays alongside, and scores that count demerits (where 0 is perfect) are converted so higher is always better on our scale.
Where a source publishes no summary judgment at all — only a list of violations — we derive a status: a visit with critical violations profiles as a fail-equivalent, one without as a pass-equivalent. Derived statuses are labeled as derived on every page. We never present a derived status as an official grade, and we never invent a letter grade a health department didn't issue.
Freshness rules
Data refreshes on a per-source cadence — daily for live APIs, weekly for bulk feeds — and every page shows its inspection dates. Establishments with no inspection in over two years are treated as likely closed: excluded from search and directories, and their pages carry a notice instead of a confident current grade. Sources themselves are monitored for freshness, and a feed that stops updating is flagged on our status page rather than silently served.
Corrections
The official record always lives with the issuing agency, which every restaurant page names and links. If you believe a record is wrong — a restaurant that closed, a grade that changed after re-inspection — the agency link is the authoritative path, and our data will reflect the correction at the next refresh. You can also flag data issues to us directly from any restaurant page.