I was re-inspected but the app still shows the old rating
Restaurant operators arrive at this with a fair complaint and the wrong target, because three separate things can be out of date and they look identical from the app. The public register may not have been updated yet. The platform may not have re-read it. Or your listing may be carrying a value that was cached when the page was built. Only the second and third are the platform’s problem, and knowing which one you are in decides whether a support ticket is worth writing.
How do I tell which of the three it is?
Check the public register first, before you contact anybody. It takes a minute and it settles the question.
If the register still shows the old rating, nothing at the platform is broken and there is no ticket to raise. The delay is administrative and sits with the local authority. Just Eat is explicit that reinstatement follows a rating “awarded … on the FSA website”, so until that entry changes, the platform is behaving correctly.
If the register shows the new rating and the app does not, you have a real discrepancy, and now the ticket has a fact in it rather than a grievance.
How long should I allow before treating it as stale?
A few days is normal. A week is worth asking about. Longer than that and something has stopped, not lagged.
Platforms read the register on their own cadence, and none of them publishes it. That silence is why operators either escalate too early, which achieves nothing, or too late, which costs a fortnight of promotional eligibility.
The sensible discipline is a diary note, not a feeling: record the date the register changed, and treat that date as the start of the clock instead of the date of the inspection.
What do I put in the ticket?
Just three items, and resist the urge to add a fourth. The date the new rating was published, the value shown in the register, and the value currently displayed on your listing.
Screenshots of both, with the date visible, do more work than any amount of explanation. Support teams at delivery platforms resolve concrete mismatches quickly and argue about vague ones for weeks, so the whole aim is to remove the argument.
Avoid bundling other grievances into the same ticket. A hygiene display mismatch is a narrow, verifiable, fixable thing. Attaching a complaint about commission or an old outage turns it into a general conversation, and general conversations do not close.
Why does this matter beyond appearances?
The rating is not decoration on every platform. On some of them it is eligibility.
Deliveroo’s Marketer criteria require an FSA rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”. If the platform is still reading your old rating, it is applying eligibility rules against a number that is no longer true, and the cost is not a wrong badge, it is promotions you should already have back.
That is the argument to make in the ticket, and it changes the urgency at the other end.
Does this happen with anything other than hygiene ratings?
Constantly, and hygiene is simply the case where the correct answer is publicly checkable.
Menu prices, opening hours, delivery zones and closure states all pass through the same kind of copy, and all of them can be right in one system and stale in the app a customer opens. The difference is that with hygiene there is a public register to compare against, and with the rest there is only the listing itself.
Which is the general lesson. What a customer sees is a separate fact from what your systems hold, and it has to be read separately. A ticket carrying two dated values, the register’s and the listing’s, gets closed, and Kitchain (kitchain.co) exists so that the second value was already recorded before anybody needed it.
What if the rating in the register is itself wrong?
That is a different route and a slower one. The FSA scheme provides a right to reply and an appeal through the local authority, both aimed at the rating rather than at the listing.
Do not run the appeal and the mismatch ticket as one conversation. The platform cannot act on a rating you are contesting, and the local authority has no interest in your listing. Keep them separate and they both move.