The Allegheny Health Department Food Safety program conducts about 12,244 inspections per year. Of those, about 9,654 produce at least one violation for an average of just under 4 violations per inspection.

Violations range between Low, Medium and High risk with the former (thankfully) accounting for the majority of violations at about 70%.

These distributions remain fairly consistent between 2015-2020. As well as the proportion of inspections by [purpose].

Surprisingly complaints are no more likely to produce a violation than a routine inspection. And re-inspections no more likely to pass without violation.

The chart below displays the above mentioned figures by year.

There seems to be a difference in the way violations were collected or categorized in 2014. Thus, this year is not included.

In particular, there are a number of facilities with a concerning amount of violations. I’m categorizing this as 10 or more violations per inspection, which is more than double the average.

The map below displays such facilities, highlighting those that did not pass inspection and therefore received either a Consumer Alert or were ordered to close.

I was curious to see how the Health Department handled such cases. If for example they were more aggressive in inspecting facilities following a poor visit (re-inspections aside).

The regression below is limited to routine (initial) inspections, 2015-2020.

The results suggest that each violation of an inspection prior leads the following inspection to occur an average of about 10 days earlier; i.e. the Health Department prioritizes the inspection of shown to be high risk facilities (as indicated by number of violations).

And the approach seems to work! As high risk facilities are inspected more often, their number of violations tend to come down.

Facilities with less prior violations tend to acquire more the next go around, but to a lesser degree. And this small increase in violations is not so concerning when there were few to begin with.