The register, with its history
Everything on this site is free to read. What is sold is the work of rebuilding 78 monthly snapshots into one series — and of knowing which of its movements are real.
The pages of this site are free and will stay free : an official fact belongs to no one. What is sold here is the compilation work — extracting the FSA register of approved food establishments, reconciling it, dating it, and delivering it in a usable form.
What is actually added
The FSA gives you 104 files. What it does not give you is the answer to “since when”, and it does not warn you that four things in those files will mislead you if you rebuild the series yourself:
- the approval numbers changed convention between 2019 and 2020, so a naive match reads every renumbering as a closure;
- the file stopped covering Scotland and Northern Ireland in April 2022 — 1,122 disappearances in one month that are not departures;
- three snapshots begin with a blank line, and a standard CSV reader returns nothing for them without erroring;
- the file names follow seven different conventions, and two of the URLs in the catalogue are Microsoft SafeLinks.
Each of those, taken at face value, produces a confident and false history. That is what is being sold: the series, and the corrections.
The flow is the product
A snapshot ages. The FSA republishes the whole register every month rather than reporting what changed, so the only way to know that a supplier left is to have kept the previous file. We keep every one and deliver the differences.
⚠️ We publish no monthly rate of arrivals or departures as a market indicator: two months are missing from the catalogue, and the register is corrected retrospectively.
- Change feed — GBP 130 / monthOr GBP 1 300 a year. At every collection, what came in, went out or changed since the previous one. This is the part that does not age.
- One slice — GBP 40 / monthThe feed restricted to a single activity or authority, for those who do not need the rest.
- Full snapshot — GBP 1 700, onceThe state of the register on the day of delivery, every field included. Listed last on purpose : a snapshot ages.
What you get, field by field
| Field | Description | Filled |
|---|---|---|
approval_number | The key, exactly as the FSA writes it. | 100.0 % |
trading_name | As recorded. | 100.0 % |
competent_authority | The authority that granted approval. | 100.0 % |
town | Withheld where the source withholds it. | 89.0 % |
approved_activities | The activities, split into 20 flags. | 98.5 % |
first_seen | ⚠️ The first monthly snapshot the number appears in — nowhere in the source. | 100.0 % |
last_seen | ⚠️ The last one. | 100.0 % |
months_present | ⚠️ How many snapshots out of 78. | 100.0 % |
still_on_register | ⚠️ Present in the most recent snapshot. | 100.0 % |
out_of_scope_2022 | ⚠️ Flags the 1,122 Scottish and Northern Irish establishments the file stopped covering — so they are never counted as departures. | 100.0 % |
address_withheld | ⚠️ Respected, not just recorded. | 100.0 % |
monthly_presence_table | ⚠️ One row per establishment per month: 446,083 rows. | 100.0 % |
The 7 fields marked ⚠️ do not exist in the source : we add them — a join, a normalisation, or a reconstructed history. That is the part a buyer cannot reproduce by downloading the official file.
Order
Tell us what you need : we reply with a sample, the field dictionary, and an invoice. No payment is taken on this site — an order opens a conversation.
Prices in GBP, before any applicable tax. Delivered as CSV and Parquet, by download link. Every request is answered by hand.