Explore Safe Eats NYC and the People Who Built It
Health risks don’t only come from what’s on your plate, they also come from
how food is handled behind the scenes. Food safety in urban environments
like New York City is a critical public health concern, especially in
neighborhoods with high restaurant density and limited resources for
inspection oversight. This raises key questions for policymakers, city
planners, and communities: Where are violations happening most? Which
cuisines or boroughs are safer? How do we track and understand food safety
over time? We know that navigating restaurant inspections can be confusing,
with different grades, scores, and violation codes. To make sense of it all,
our team built Safe Eats NYC, a platform that brings transparency to health
inspection data across all five boroughs. Safe Eats NYC visualizes key data
like restaurant grades, average violation scores, critical issues by
cuisine, and borough-level safety trends. It aims to empower New Yorkers,
from diners to decision-makers, with accessible, actionable insights to help
drive informed choices and stronger accountability.
Safe Eats NYC maps and visualizes restaurant inspection data across the five
boroughs to provide actionable insights into food safety trends. The
platform includes an interactive heatmap showing up-to-date average
inspection scores by zipcode, allowing users to quickly identify areas with
higher or lower food safety performance. To assess the overall risk of
health violations in different communities, Safe Eats NYC aggregates and
compares key inspection metrics, including average score, frequency of
critical violations, and cuisine-specific patterns. The built-in search
function lets users look up individual restaurants or filter results by zip
code or borough, making it easy to explore both local and citywide food
safety conditions. Visual dashboards highlight trends over time, breakdowns
by cuisine type, and comparisons across boroughs. All data featured on the
Safe Eats NYC platform is downloadable from NYC Open Data, enabling
community groups, researchers, and policymakers to conduct deeper analysis,
advocate for safer food practices, and inform equitable health policy
decisions across New York City.
Safe Eats NYC was made possible by the data provided by the Department of
Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) on
NYC OpenData, which provides public access to a wealth of city data, including
restaurant inspection records.
Special thanks to Professor Jianting Zhang for his guidance and support
throughout the project.