The news: Seattle startup Hazel Analytics expanded its partnership with Yelp that provides health inspection data pinned to restaurant reviews. The service is now available in regions of 48 states, up from four states previously. The data is collected from health departments that serve nearly 70% of the U.S. population, as well as Toronto and Vancouver, B.C., according to a statement released Thursday by Yelp announcing the new rollout.
The data: Hazel Analytics collects public data from thousands of health departments and converts it into a standardized, user-friendly format. Yelp users see a health rating provided by health authorities, or if that is not available, a rating generated by Hazel based on restaurant inspection data.
The people: Hazel has four founders that started the company in 2014: University of Maryland professor Ben Bederson, a computer scientist; University of Maryland professor and economist Ginger Jin; Phillip Leslie, Amazon’s chief digital economist and a former economics professor at UCLA; and Arash Nasibi, who previously worked as a business consultant and is CEO. The idea for the company originated with research by Jin and Leslie showing that publicly posted restaurant inspection grades decreased food-borne illness.
Early days: The startup received funding through the University of Maryland and the state of Maryland to pull together an early team and launch its beta product in 2015. The company now has 20 employees and has been profitable since 2018, said Nasibi.
The customers: The company’s core product is its Food Safety Insights software marketed to restaurant chains. Hazel provides dashboards of inspection information along with data such as comparisons to other restaurants. Chick-Fil-A and Jack in the Box were among the first customers, and now more than 200 major brands have signed on. “Slow, steady growth has been the name of our game,” said Nasibi.
The partnership: Yelp previously worked with other vendors for its inspection data and last May brought on Hazel, which is now its only health data provider. The partnership enables Hazel to move from serving restaurants to providing data directly to consumers. “We can rely on the reputation and reliability of a partner like Yelp to deliver that information so that we don’t have to do it directly,” said Nasibi. Seattle’s King County does not yet offer health ratings on Yelp.
Public data, private service: Restaurant inspection information should ideally be readily available through public interfaces, said Sarah Schacht, who has consulted with previous Yelp partners and worked to standardize such data. The U.S. government is interested in facilitating standardization, but the data remain fragmented. “Ultimately, it’s a net good for consumers to be able to see restaurant inspections anywhere,” said Schacht, who advocated for the current health rating system in King County. Nasibi hopes the new rollout will encourage health departments, consumers and restaurants to “work a bit more in unison.”
The rankings: About half of health departments do not issue public ratings after restaurant inspections, and doing so is illegal in some jurisdictions, largely because of lobbying from the restaurant industry, said Schacht. “It’s a controversial tactic in the public health world to create scores for jurisdictions that are prohibited from having scores,” she said. Nasibi said his company developed a “science-based” understanding of scoring methodology used by health departments, which it applies to inspection data from departments that do not produce ratings.
What’s next: Schacht notes that providing data to restaurant chains can give them a market advantage over independent businesses. But Hazel’s next project may help level the playing field — the company aims to roll out its insights platform to individual restaurants. Starting Thursday, potential customers can sign up on the website to receive information on future product availability. Nasibi is also interested in helping health departments digitize and standardize their data. Meanwhile, he said the company is “serving as the digital information bridge between that old way of doing things and the more modern, digitized real-time big data approach.”
