Skip to main content

Yelp creates LIVE standard to unify restaurant hygiene scores

yelp health score
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Yelp reviews can make or break businesses, to the extent that legal spats are a commonplace between customers and establishments. Starting today, restaurants will have something else to worry (or not worry) about, with the addition of restaurant hygiene scores starting in New York City and San Francisco.

Yelp will be adding raw numerical scores to restaurant listings, which the site says is a new standard coined the Local Inspector Value-entry Specification — or just called LIVE. The scores range between 0 and 100, depending on what the local health inspector has determined.

Food and health inspection scores are tallied and interpreted differently by state. In South Carolina, a numerical score between 70-100 is translated to a grade between A and C. In New York City, grades are based on point deductions. There is no standard, but Yelp is trying to solve that problem. What Yelp has done with LIVE is to change this and create a unified standard across all states that customers can understand no matter where they’re eating in.

yelp restaurant hygiene break down
Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you click on the “Health Score,” which you’ll find above the hours of operation and below “Explore the Menu,” a page with all the information you want to know about the restaurant’s hygiene is at your disposal. You can check the violation and the establishment’s history of inspections. To point out why scores and grades alone are dubious, the restaurant Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman plugs as an example in the blog post has a health score of 92. But if you dig into its inspection history, you’ll notice that points were deducted for “rodents/roaches/flies/other animals.” That might make you think twice about eating there.

While San Francisco and New York are the first states to have LIVE rolled out to, the next cities on the list include Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago.

Francis Bea
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Francis got his first taste of the tech industry in a failed attempt at a startup during his time as a student at the…
X rival Threads could be about to get millions of more users
Instagram Threads app.

Threads -- Meta’s rival to X, formerly Twitter -- has just launched in the European Union (EU), a market with nearly half a billion people.

The app launched in the U.S. to much fanfare in July, with Meta hoping to attract X users disillusioned with the turbulence on the platform since Elon Musk acquired it for $44 billion 14 months ago.

Read more
X (formerly Twitter) returns after global outage
A white X on a black background, which could be Twitter's new logo.

X, formerly known as Twitter, went down for about 90 minutes for users worldwide early on Thursday ET.

Anyone opening the social media app across all platforms was met with a blank timeline. On desktop, users saw a message that simply read, "Welcome to X," while on mobile the app showed suggestions for accounts to follow.

Read more
How to create multiple profiles on a Facebook account
A series of social media app icons on a colorful smartphone screen.

Facebook (and, by extension, Meta) are particular in the way that they allow users to create accounts and interact with their platform. Being the opposite of the typical anonymous service, Facebook sticks to the rule of one account per one person. However, Facebook allows its users to create multiple profiles that are all linked to one main Facebook account.

In much the same way as Japanese philosophy tells us we have three faces — one to show the world, one to show family, and one to show no one but ourselves — these profiles allow us to put a different 'face' out to different aspects or hobbies. One profile can keep tabs on your friends, while another goes hardcore into networking and selling tech on Facebook Marketplace.

Read more