Yelp is about to make it a whole lot easier to find out whether your favorite local restaurant is passing its health department inspections. The company has announced it will dramatically expand the number of Yelp pages that include a restaurant's hygiene rating.
Almost five years ago, Yelp created a program called Local Inspector Value-Entry Specification, or LIVES. The program was a partnership with local health departments to pull in data about health inspections that has grown to cover 200,000 pages on Yelp.
The company will now triple that to 750,000 pages as it rolls the program out nationally to 42 states, according to a blog post by Luther Lowe, Yelp's vice president of public policy. The service will continue through a partnership with HDScores, a company that has built a national health inspection database.
Lowe noted that studies have shown that increased access to hygiene scores can lead to regional reductions in foodborne illnesses. "Our goal has always been to give consumers as much information as possible about local businesses," he wrote.