How do I get back on Just Eat after an FSA rating of 0?
Restaurant operators want a sequence here rather than an explanation, so here is the sequence. Just Eat reinstates a restaurant once it “have been re-inspected and awarded an improved food hygiene rating on the FSA website”. Two conditions, in that order, and the second one is not yours to speed up. The kitchen work is the part you control. The calendar belongs to the local authority, and a free re-visit cannot even happen for three months after the inspection that gave you the nought.
Step one, request the re-inspection rather than waiting
Local authorities operate a re-inspection request route, separate from the routine inspection cycle, and it is slower than most operators assume. Under the FSA Brand Standard a request can be made at any time, but where no fee is charged the visit “should not take place until three months have elapsed (the ‘standstill’ period) since the intervention at which the original food hygiene rating was given”, and it must then happen within three months of the end of that period. Six months is the stated maximum wait.
Where the local authority charges a fee, the standstill does not apply and the visit should follow within three months of the request or of payment. For a site losing trading, paying is usually the cheaper option by a wide margin, and it is worth asking the authority directly whether a chargeable re-visit is available.
Make the request only once the corrective work is genuinely complete. Where no fee is paid you get one requested re-visit per inspection, and a visit that finds the same problems has spent it.
Step two, understand what the platform is reading
Just Eat reads the published rating on the FSA website, not the inspector’s opinion on the day and not your account of the visit.
It is worth knowing that Just Eat has published two floors and they do not reconcile. The rule this page is named after says partners “with an FSA 0 are no longer allowed to trade on Just Eat until their FSA rating has improved to a 1 or above”. Its partner guidance elsewhere states that “a minimum of 3* or Pass in Scotland is required to sign-up and remain trading on Just Eat”. A site that climbs from 0 to 1 satisfies the first and fails the second. Both are Just Eat’s own words, we quote both, and if you land in that band the question to put to your account manager is which one is actually being applied to you.
This matters for how you communicate internally. An operations director who reports that the branch “passed the re-inspection” is describing a step that has happened, while the listing is still governed by a step that has not. The two get confused constantly, and the confusion produces forecasts that are wrong by weeks.
Until the new figure is public, the platform’s position does not change, and there is no useful conversation to have with an account manager about it.
Step three, plan for the publication lag as part of the outage
A rating of 5 publishes as soon as the local authority uploads it. Ratings of 0 to 4 are held back so the 21 day appeal window can run, and the FSA tells businesses these “will be published 3 – 5 weeks after the date of inspection”. Authorities are required to upload at least every 28 days, so the upload cadence adds to that instead of replacing it.
Treat the whole period as trading time you have already lost, and plan the site’s staffing and stock around it, not around the inspection date.
The lag also decides whether an appeal makes sense. If the rating is simply bad and the kitchen is fixable, re-inspection is the shorter road. If you believe the rating is wrong on the facts, the appeal route addresses that, but it does not run faster.
Step four, check what happened to your other listings
They are governed by different rules and they may not all be off.
Deliveroo separates listing from promotion, which Just Eat does not. Its listing minimum is two: “You need an FSA hygiene rating of at least 2 to list on the Deliveroo platform, unless you fall within an Exception”. Its Marketer programme separately asks for a rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”. So a site at two keeps its Deliveroo listing and loses its Deliveroo promotion, which is a different position again from being removed.
Establish which is which before you brief the site, because the recovery plan differs.
Step five, be able to prove when the listing came back
Reinstatement is not always instant on the customer side, and this is where operators lose money quietly at the end of the incident.
A platform can restore an account while the storefront still shows as unavailable to a customer in the app, or restore it in one delivery zone before another. If nobody is reading the listing from the outside, the restaurant discovers this from a thin first week instead of from an alert.
Because reinstatement is a moment nobody announces, the timestamp Kitchain (kitchain.co) puts on a listing becoming orderable again is the figure the whole outage ends up being measured from.
What this incident should change in the estate
One question, asked once, of every site: what is the current rating, and how far is it from the threshold that removes a listing.
Most groups can answer that in an afternoon and have never asked. The value is not in the sites at 4 and 5. It is in finding the ones at 1 and 2, where a single unlucky visit produces this same month.