I pulled Chicago's food inspection dataset via their public API and filtered down to failed inspections only. A few things stood out.
Subway topping the list makes sense by volume since they have more locations than most chains, but 69 failures is still a lot. Dunkin' Donuts at 33 is a big drop to second. What's interesting is that smaller local chains like Sharks Fish & Chicken and Las Islas Marias are sitting in the top 5 alongside brands with massive corporate compliance teams.
Most of the failed inspections are coming from routine canvass visits, the unannounced scheduled ones, not complaints. 3,128 failures from canvass versus 1,021 from complaints. So the system is catching more through routine checks than through people actually reporting problems.
Over 4,500 of the failed inspections are from high risk establishments. High risk just means places that cook raw meat on site or serve vulnerable populations, basically most sit-down restaurants. Medium risk added 700, low risk only 102.
The one that actually surprised me was schools showing up third in failures by facility type with 633, sitting just behind grocery stores. That's not a food industry problem, that's a different conversation entirely.
Built in Python using pandas and matplotlib. Data is from Chicago's open data portal.
by datanerdke