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.

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.