Welcome!
Welcome to the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme Application Programming Interface (FHRS API). The FHRS API provides free programmatic access to the Food Standards Agency Rating Data for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Developers can leverage FSA data to provide their own services and websites, allowing you to build and develop custom solutions that are consistent with the data being held and displayed by the FSA. As a developer you get access to the same data and the majority of the same functionality that is used to deliver the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme website.
Getting Started
Other than calling the available endpoints, there are no registration requirements for developers before they can start using the Food Standards Agency data. No sign-up process, API keys, or login details are required at this time to use the service. Note: If this situation changes, then this documentation will be updated and a new version of the FHRS API will be issued.
Some important information
API Versions
The FHRS API is a versioned API, meaning that multiple versions of the API can exist in parallel and the developer is free to select which version they wish to use. To select the appropriate version, all calls to the API must include the version required in the header (an example is shown below). The FSA will maintain at least one previous depreciated version of the API to allow developers to migrate their code steadily, however the FSA make no guarantees that older versions of the API will continue to work when they fall more than one version behind the current API. Please note: If a version is not supplied in the header, calls to FHRS API endpoints will not return data.
To select a version number add the following to the header request:
Languages
The FHRS API is able to return requests in both English and Welsh languages. To select the appropriate language, calls to the API should include the language required in the header (an example is shown below). Please note that the default is for English returned if no header value is supplied. Please note that due to data translations, the same results may not be returned for a search in different languages.
To select Welsh return values add the following to the header request:
Data Lookup
A number of endpoints are provided within the FHRS API to allow developers to request relevant lookup data which can be used in other endpoints to search for establishment records. Most endpoints provide the ability for a developer to request 'basic' or 'detailed' information, depending on their requirement.
Search
The Establishments endpoint provides the ability for developers to search the ratings data using a number of search terms, filters as well as spatial information. The developer can also request the paging and sorting used for the return data to reduce the volume of data required per call. For specific details of the usage of the search please refer to the Establishments section of the API Index.
Technical Prerequisites
This guidance assumes that you are familiar with Web Services and XML (Both structure and syntax). For refreshers or overviews of these topics w3schools offer guides describing both of these topics in detail. Whilst the FHRS API is programming language agnostic, any examples are currently only be provided in C#, for examples of Web Services interactions with other languages, please refer to your specific language reference guides.