How restaurant inspections work in Minnesota
Who inspects Minnesota's restaurants, how results are graded, and how to read them on CleanPlate.
CleanPlate's Minnesota coverage is Minneapolis, one of the relatively few big cities publishing full violation-level inspection data.
Who does the inspecting
The Minneapolis Health Department inspects the city's food businesses; most of the rest of Minnesota is inspected by the state health and agriculture departments, which don't yet publish machine-readable records.
How results are graded
Minneapolis doesn't issue summary grades. Its data records each violation with an FDA-style priority tier — Priority (direct illness risk), Priority Foundation, and Core. CleanPlate derives each inspection's status from those tiers: visits with Priority violations profile as fails, tier-2/3-only visits as passes, and the status is labeled as derived throughout.
Reading it on CleanPlate
Every Minnesota restaurant page on CleanPlate shows the establishment's current standing, its full inspection history with dates, and a link to the official agency behind the record. Grades are shown exactly as reported; where the source publishes no summary grade, the derived status is labeled as derived. Establishments with no inspection in over two years are treated as likely closed and excluded from search.