Benefits and impacts - foundry4/fsa-digital-badges GitHub Wiki

Benefits and Impact

Consumers

  • Will be presented with consistent badges, which are recognisable as FSA's, appear authentic, consistent, lingual, accessible and have enough context to explain what the rating means. They will find these across all web platforms including individaul food business websites, chains, apps, aggregator sites and social media.

  • They will not have to search for this information, instead it will be clearly visible at the 'point of choice' (on online menus, alongside contact details, on booking forms).

  • They can make an informed choice whether to engage with that food business based on their food hygiene rating alongside other parameters such as user ratings, types of food, price, location etc.

  • If they want more information, the badge will click through to the FHRS website, where further details about the rating can be found.

  • Consumers will 'vote with their feet', as awareness grows, they will expect to see a rating, choose businesses with a higher rating and likely avoid businesses who do not display.

Businesses

  • For high rated businesses (4-5 rating), being offered a simple and effective way to display their rating online will be a positive step. It can be used as a marketing tool, offering their consumers confidence to engage with their business. Group businesses are keen to drive up ratings, this will add urgency.
  • For aggregators sites, setting a minimum rating drives up credibility of their brand as users are less likely to have a bad experience of a restaurant represented by their brand.
  • For low rated businesses (2 and below), impact will likely be higher. They are already being excluded from trading on some aggregator sites and actively displaying a poor rating at the point consumers are likely to engage will damage them commercially.
  • For all businesses there is an associated time and cost impact to display badges across their apps and websites. For small businesses this is likely to be taken up by trying to understand how to do it themselves or employing someone to do it for them. They may need to redesign parts of their website to allow for the badge. For larger businesses the effort will be in implementation across multiple websites at the same time. If they aren't templated, there will be a redesign/UX job to do for each brand.
  • Businesses who are 'awaiting inspection' may also experience negative impact from displaying no rating
  • The time lags in the system are likely to have a negative impact on businesses who are appealing a rating, requesting a re-inspection or just lower down the priority list. If they have improved their hygiene, they will want this to be reflected in their rating as soon as possible as every day they may be losing business online (or being excluded from aggregator sites)

Local Authorities

  • The benefit of digital badges is that the hygiene standards are likely to be pushed up due to impact to business of low ratings being displayed and consumer awareness rising.
  • There is likely to be an impact on workload for local authorities - we foresee an increase in re-rating requests, with pressure to do these quickly
  • There is work to be done to digitise processes - using tablets at inspections and sending ratings out digitally too
  • Database integration will have to be implemented at each local authority - including data clean up and consolidation
  • EHOs will need to pick up on communicating about digital badges at inspections
  • Enforcement will be added to the workload of often stretched EHO teams.