Check a food establishment approval number

Type the number printed inside the oval mark, or the name of the establishment. 9,302 establishments, 5,334 of them still on the register.

The number is printed on the product

Every establishment handling products of animal origin in the UK must be approved under Regulation (EC) 853/2004 and must apply an identification mark — the oval you find on a pack of bacon, a box of eggs or a case of fish. Inside it: the country, and the establishment's approval number.

That number is the only thing linking a physical product to the premises that handled it. This site turns it back into a name, a place, an authority, and a date range.

What no one else publishes: since when, and until when

The Food Standards Agency publishes a snapshot of the register every month, and has done since 2018 — 104 files, side by side. Each says who is approved that month. None says how long anyone has been there.

Rebuilding the series gives what the snapshots hold and never state: 2,913 arrivals and 2,846 departures between January 2020 and August 2026, establishment by establishment. Year by year.

⚠️ Three things this site will not tell you

• Why an establishment left. The file records an absence, not a reason. A departure can be a withdrawn approval, a closure, a merger, a renumbering or a corrected record — and we will not guess which.
• That April 2022 was a wave of closures. 1,122 establishments vanish from the file that month — 797 in Scotland, 325 in Northern Ireland — because the file stopped covering them. None returns. They are excluded from every departure count here.
• Where 1,019 of them are. The source marks their address as withheld. We do not republish it, in any form.

What the register covers

England and Wales, plus the Crown Dependencies — England (4,901), Wales (402), Jersey (22), Isle of Man (8), Guernsey (1). An oval reading IE, FR or NL belongs to another country's register: this file has never covered them, and it stopped covering Scotland and Northern Ireland in April 2022.

The approved activities

• Processing plant — 4,866
• Cold store — 2,747
• Meat preparation establishment — 1,594
• Re-wrapping and repackaging — 1,225
• Cutting plant — 1,177
• Egg packing centre — 1,093
• Minced meat establishment — 1,081
• Fresh fishery products plant — 514
• Shellfish dispatch centre — 356
• Slaughterhouse — 318
• Shellfish purification centre — 147
• Factory vessel — 89
• Game handling establishment — 79
• Collection centre — 39
• Mechanically separated meat establishment — 32
• Liquid egg plant — 28
• Freezer vessel — 26
• Wholesale market — 23
• Auction hall — 19
• Producing plant — 9

The largest competent authorities

• Food Standards Agency — 1,331
• Cornwall — 210
• North East Lincolnshire — 154
• Birmingham City Council — 150
• North Yorkshire Council — 121
• Somerset Council — 117
• Food Standards Scotland — 116
• Ealing (London Borough) — 115
• Dorset Council — 107
• Brent (London Borough) — 101
• Bradford City — 99
• Aberdeenshire — 96
• Tower Hamlets (London Borough) — 94
• Highland — 90
• Shropshire — 87
• Wiltshire — 77
• Leeds — 70
• King's Lynn and West Norfolk — 67
• Argyll and Bute — 64
• Newry, Mourne and Down District — 59

All 20 activities · 224 authorities · 146 towns · The history, year by year

Sourcing from an approved establishment?

Being on this register is the legal minimum to place products of animal origin on the market — it is not a recommendation, and this site makes none. Tell us what you are sourcing and where, and we will put the enquiry in front of establishments that are on the register. We are not brokers, we hold no stock, and we take no commission.

We read every message ourselves. Your email is used to reply and to pass the enquiry on, and nothing else — see the privacy page.

Bulk checks and API · Buy the prepared dataset · What this site is and is not