NoteHygiene — French food hygiene ratings, demystified
Official inspection results for 93,072 restaurants and food businesses across France, rebuilt as a consumer-friendly, French-language reference site.
Food hygiene transparency for France
France inspects its food businesses and publishes the outcomes — yet hardly anyone outside the industry knows where to look. NoteHygiene, one of my own products, takes those official results and reshapes them into plain-language profiles a diner can check on the way to a reservation.
The scenarios are everyday ones: vetting a restaurant before booking, checking the corner bakery, or looking up the canteen that feeds your kids at school. Inspections carried out by DDPP agents (the departmental consumer-protection services) sit behind every score shown.
What the site does
- Multi-key search — establishment name, town, postcode or SIRET business number.
- Per-establishment profiles showing the official hygiene level from the latest control.
- Activity-type hubs: 12,034 bakeries and patisseries, 9,759 canteens and collective kitchens, 7,510 butchers, 6,489 supermarkets and grocers, plus abattoirs, caterers and food transport.
- Geographic drill-down through regions, 101 departments and 14,391 towns — Île-de-France alone holds 17,390 establishments.
- A national scoreboard visualising how the four hygiene levels are distributed across the country.
- Editorial depth: 9 pillar guides and 18 articles covering Alim'confiance, HACCP and consumer food safety.
The data behind the ratings
Everything traces back to a single authoritative source: the Alim'confiance results released by the French Ministry of Agriculture under the Licence Ouverte open-data licence. The site syncs against it daily and — unusually for this kind of project — publishes its own methodology guide explaining exactly how records become profiles. Current coverage spans 93,072 establishments in 14,391 communes across 101 departments, overseas territories included.
See it in action: Visit notehygiene.com.
Built for scale, localised for France
Under the hood it follows my house pattern for data products: a custom Laravel + PHP backend, a MySQL database tuned for tens of thousands of profile pages, and an automated ingestion pipeline that processes the official dataset every day with no manual steps. No themes, no plugins.
The SEO layer is programmatic and written natively in French — each establishment, town, department and activity type owns an indexable URL with unique metadata, positioning the site for thousands of local queries like "hygiène restaurant" plus a city name.
FAQ
What is Alim'confiance and how does NoteHygiene relate to it?
Alim'confiance is France's official transparency scheme for sanitary inspections: the Ministry of Agriculture publishes hygiene control results under an open licence (Licence Ouverte). NoteHygiene ingests that dataset and turns it into searchable profiles for every inspected food business.
What hygiene levels can an establishment receive?
French inspectors assign one of four levels: very satisfactory, satisfactory, to improve, or to correct urgently. The national breakdown shown on the site is reassuring — 24% score the top level and 71% satisfactory, meaning 95% of inspected businesses pass comfortably.
How do visitors find a specific restaurant or shop?
By typing a name, town, postcode or SIRET number (the French business identifier) into the main search, or by browsing the site's hubs: activity type, city, department or region. Bakeries alone account for 12,034 profiles.
Why build the whole product in French?
Because the audience is French consumers checking a hygiene score before eating somewhere. Everything — including 9 pillar guides and 18 blog articles about HACCP and food safety — is written natively in French to rank in that market.