Why is my hygiene rating wrong on the delivery app?
Restaurant operators mean one of three quite different things by wrong, and the fix differs for each. The rating may be out of date, which is a timing problem. It may belong to a different premises with a similar name or address, which is a matching problem. Or it may be missing entirely where a value is expected, which usually means the platform could not match your listing to a register entry at all. Only the second and third are worth a support ticket on the day.
How do I tell an out of date rating from a wrong one?
Open the public register and compare. Whatever it shows is the correct answer, and the app either agrees with it or does not.
If the register and the app agree, but neither matches your inspection, then the register has not been updated and there is nothing for the platform to fix. If the register is current and the app is behind, that is a real mismatch and the ticket writes itself.
That single check saves most of the argument, and almost nobody does it before contacting support. It does not have to be done by hand either. The FSA runs an open ratings API with no barrier to entry, in its own words “No sign-up process, API keys, or login details are required at this time to use the service”, plus a nightly file for each local authority. For a group, that means the correct value for every site can be pulled automatically and held against what each app is displaying.
Why would the app show another restaurant’s rating?
Matching a delivery listing to a register entry is done on name and address, and both are messy in the real world.
Units in a parade of shops, addresses that changed when a site was refurbished, a trading name that differs from the registered name, a kitchen registered at the unit behind the shopfront: all of these produce near misses. A group that has rebranded a site is especially exposed, because the register may still hold the previous business.
The tell is usually a rating that has never moved despite your own inspections, or one that changed on a date when nothing happened to you.
What does a missing rating look like, and is it bad?
It shows as a gap where other listings carry a value, or as one of the placeholder states platforms accept in place of a number.
Deliveroo’s Marketer criteria treat this explicitly, requiring a rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”. So a legitimately unrated new site is not automatically excluded. What does hurt is an unmatched site, where nothing is displayed because nothing was found, and the platform cannot tell the difference between that and a bad record.
New openings are the common case, and they are worth checking in the first fortnight rather than the first quarter.
Who fixes it, the platform or the council?
The platform fixes display and matching. The local authority fixes the rating and the register entry.
Send each problem to the party that owns it. A restaurant that raises a matching error with its council, or a rating dispute with a platform, gets a polite deflection and loses two weeks. If the register entry itself carries wrong details, such as an old trading name, correcting that at source also fixes the match, and it is often the faster route.
Why does this matter beyond how the page looks?
On some platforms the rating gates access to promotion and advertising instead of merely appearing under your name.
If the platform is reading a rating that is not yours, or one you have since improved, it is applying eligibility rules against a value that is not true. The loss is not cosmetic. It is the promotional access you should already have, and it continues for as long as nobody compares the two numbers.
Should I be checking this routinely?
Once a quarter per site is enough, and it takes minutes if somebody actually looks at the listing instead of at an internal record.
Menu prices, opening hours and delivery areas are copies inside the platform in exactly the same way, and a copy can go stale while every system you own says otherwise. Hygiene is the easy case, because a public register settles who is right. Everywhere else the only comparison available is a Kitchain (kitchain.co) reading of the listing set against what you believe you published.