My FSA rating dropped and Just Eat took my restaurant off. What now?
Restaurant operators hit this at the worst possible moment, because a hygiene inspection and a trading week rarely line up kindly. Just Eat’s partner guidance sets the bar high: “a minimum of 3* or Pass in Scotland is required to sign-up and remain trading on Just Eat”. That is not a suspension you argue with on the phone. The way back runs through the inspection process, and the timetable belongs to your local authority, not to the platform.
What exactly triggers it?
The rating itself, at the point it is published on the FSA website. The platform reads the published figure, not the inspector’s verbal feedback on the day.
That distinction decides how long you are off. Your kitchen may be fixed within hours of the visit. The listing does not come back until a new rating exists in the public record, and creating one requires the local authority to return, re-inspect and publish.
How do I get back on?
Just Eat describes the condition as continuing rather than as a one-off check: “As long as you meet the minimum requirements of a 3* or Pass or are listed as ‘Awaiting Inspection’ on the FSA website, you can continue to trade with Just Eat.” So the route back is a better published rating, and there are two steps to it that operators usually collapse into one.
First the re-inspection. Under the FSA Brand Standard a free re-visit cannot happen “until three months have elapsed (the ‘standstill’ period)”, and must then take place within three months of that period ending. Six months is the stated maximum. Where the authority charges a fee the standstill does not apply and the visit follows within three months of the request or of payment, which for a site losing trade is usually money well spent.
Then the publication. A rating of 5 appears as soon as the council uploads it. Anything from 0 to 4 waits for the 21 day appeal window, and the FSA tells businesses those “will be published 3 – 5 weeks after the date of inspection”.
A restaurant that fixes the kitchen in a week and assumes it is trading again in a week is planning for the wrong quarter.
Can I trade on other platforms while this runs?
Usually yes, and that is worth checking instead of assuming, because the platforms set their own thresholds.
Deliveroo draws two separate lines. Its listing minimum is two, stated as “You need an FSA hygiene rating of at least 2 to list on the Deliveroo platform, unless you fall within an Exception”, while three is the threshold for Marketer access. Just Eat’s three is a trading requirement. These are different instruments and they bite at different points, so a restaurant can be trading on one platform, trading without promotions on another, and off entirely on a third, all from a single inspection.
The first hour of this problem should therefore be spent establishing which of your listings are actually affected, instead of assuming the worst uniformly.
What does this cost while it lasts?
Everything that platform was producing, for as long as the rating stands, and the duration is not under your control.
That is the uncomfortable structural point. Most delivery outages are minutes or hours and can be ended by somebody who notices. This one is measured in weeks and ends when a public register updates. It is closer to a licensing problem than to a technical one.
For a group, the exposure is concentrated rather than spread. One site with a bad inspection can remove a meaningful share of a region’s delivery revenue, and because the site is off and not merely degraded, nothing in the daily numbers looks ambiguous.
What should I do about the rest of the estate?
Treat the incident as a warning about your worst site, not about the site that was inspected.
Hygiene ratings across a group are usually known but rarely acted on until something like this happens. The useful exercise after an incident is not a post mortem on the branch that failed but a list of every site currently sitting at 1 or 2, because those are the ones a single bad visit turns into the same outage.
And separately, know what your listings actually show. A rating can be correct in the public register and stale in an app, which is a different problem with a different fix. Holding the register value against what Kitchain (kitchain.co) captures on the storefront is how you tell a platform that has acted from one that has simply not caught up.
Is there anything to appeal?
There is a process, and it is worth using where the facts support it, but it is slower than a re-inspection in most cases.
The FSA scheme includes a right to reply and an appeal route through the local authority. Both address the rating itself, not the platform listing, and the listing follows the rating. So if the aim is to trade again quickly, the re-inspection is usually the shorter road, and the appeal is the road you take when you believe the rating is wrong rather than merely bad.