# The register year by year: who arrived, who left — approval-number

> 2,913 arrivals and 2,846 departures between 2020 and 2026, rebuilt from the FSA's monthly snapshots.

## The register, year by year

The Food Standards Agency publishes a snapshot every month and never a history. This is what the snapshots contain once you put them side by side.

### How this was rebuilt, and what limits it

102 monthly snapshots are catalogued, from January 2018 to August 2026.
Only **78** of them are usable for a history, and the reason is
worth stating: **the approval numbers changed convention**. Until
2019 they were local, prefixed by the authority (`AR 001`); from
January 2020 they are national (`1000`). Matching across that break
would read every renumbering as a closure followed by a new arrival.

So the series here runs **January 2020 to August 2026**. Of the
establishments in it, 58.9%
can also be found in the 2018-2019 files by name and postcode — a figure we
publish, not a link we rely on.

⚠️ Two months are missing from the catalogue: **August and
November 2024**. A departure that happened in one of them is dated to
the next month actually published.

⚠️ **April 2022 is not a wave of closures.**
1,122 establishments disappear from the file that month — 797 in Scotland
and 325 in Northern Ireland — because the file stopped covering them, and none
returns. Every departure count on this site excludes them.

*Arrivals and departures by year*

| Year | First seen | Last seen | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| [2020](/history/2020.md) | 474 | 601 | -127 |
| [2021](/history/2021.md) | 614 | 383 | +231 |
| [2022](/history/2022.md) | 381 | 351 | +30 |
| [2023](/history/2023.md) | 352 | 426 | -74 |
| [2024](/history/2024.md) | 362 | 287 | +75 |
| [2025](/history/2025.md) | 459 | 617 | -158 |
| [2026](/history/2026.md) | 271 | 181 | +90 |

The 6,389 establishments
already on the register in January 2020 are not counted as arrivals: that is
the start of observation, not a wave of approvals.

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Página: https://approval-number.pages.dev/history/
Fonte: Approved Food Establishments — Food Standards Agency, 102 monthly snapshots
Recolha: 2026-08-20