Does my hygiene rating affect my delivery orders?
Restaurant operators usually expect this question to be about customer squeamishness, and that is the smaller half of the answer. Yes, guests see the rating, and some of them act on it. But the route that moves real volume is mechanical: UK platforms use the rating as a gate on promotional and advertising programmes, so a rating below their threshold removes marketing rather than persuasion. That effect is larger, arrives faster, and produces no signal a restaurant can see from inside its own systems.
What is the mechanical route, exactly?
Programme eligibility. Just Eat lists an “FSA rating of 3+ or a ‘Pass'” among the criteria for Local Legend. Deliveroo requires a rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'” for Marketer access.
Cross either line downward and the platform withdraws the programme. Deliveroo reserves the right to do so “at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”.
The result is a listing that is still live, still accepting orders, and no longer being pushed. Volume falls because fewer people are shown the restaurant, not because they saw it and declined.
And the customer route?
Real but unmeasurable from where you sit. A guest choosing between listings sees the rating alongside price, time and star rating, and weighs it however they weigh it.
Nobody can give you a number for that, and anybody who offers one is guessing. What can be said is that it operates continuously and quietly, and that it works in the same direction as the mechanical route, which is why a drop in rating usually costs more than either effect alone would suggest.
Which effect is bigger?
The mechanical one, in almost every case, because it is a step rather than a drift.
Losing promotional placement changes how many customers ever see the listing. Customer squeamishness changes what a fraction of those who see it do next. A step change at the top of the funnel outweighs a shift in conversion further down, and it happens in a day rather than over months.
How does this show up in my numbers?
As a soft month with no cause, which is the worst way for anything to show up.
There is no ticket, no outage, no complaint and no error. Orders are simply lower. Investigations of soft months tend to look at weather, competitors and pricing, because those are the explanations that come to mind, and the actual cause is an eligibility flag that changed silently four weeks earlier.
This is why the diary discipline matters more than the analysis. If somebody records the expected publication date of every rating, the soft month has an obvious first suspect instead of a list of plausible ones.
Can I see whether my promotions are still running?
Only by looking at the storefront, which is the point most operators miss. A promotion configured in the portal and a promotion visible to a customer are two different facts, and the portal will keep showing you the first one.
That gap is not specific to hygiene. It appears whenever an eligibility rule, a scheduling rule or a platform-side decision sits between what you set and what is shown. Where an offer quietly stops appearing, a Kitchain (kitchain.co) record of the storefront puts a date on it, and a date is the difference between a cause and a theory.
What is the smallest useful action?
Know which of your sites are below three, and treat each one as a marketing budget you are not spending.
That reframing tends to move faster than a compliance argument. A general manager who hears that a site has a hygiene problem plans a deep clean. A finance director who hears that the same site has lost platform-funded promotion for the rest of the quarter moves it up the list. Both conversations are about the same inspection.