Half A Million Of You Looked Up A Kitchen

Eat Safely In Florida went live on 24 August. Three weeks later it has passed 500,000 visits. I have read that sentence about nine times and it still looks like a typo.

I want to say what it is, what it isn’t, and what I’ve learned from watching half a million strangers use a thing I built at my kitchen table. But first: thank you. Genuinely. I made this because I wanted it to exist. I did not expect anyone else to.

What The Number Actually Is

I don’t run analytics. There’s no tracker on the site, no cookie, nothing that phones home — the privacy page says so and I meant it. The count comes from Cloudflare’s request totals on the server side, which tell me how many pages were served and nothing about who asked.

So it’s a count of pages served, not people tracked. Some of that is one person checking six restaurants before a birthday dinner. Some is a health inspector, I’d bet. Some is bots. I’m fine with the fuzziness. I’d rather have a rough number and your privacy than a precise one and a dashboard of your movements.

What You Were Looking At

Every inspection the state of Florida has done — 440,441 of them across 79,267 restaurants in all 67 counties — in the inspectors’ own words. Not summaries. The actual sentences. “Live, small flying insects found 2 live flies in prep area.” That one’s real.

The data was always public. It sits on a state website as spreadsheets and a lookup form built sometime around the second Bush administration. Public is not the same as usable. Nobody standing outside a restaurant at seven on a Friday is going to download a workbook. So I did the boring part once, for everyone.

Three Things Half A Million Visits Taught Me

People want the good news as much as the bad. I expected the Hall of Shame to carry the site. It doesn’t. People look up the restaurant they’ve been going to for fifteen years, find out it’s clean, and feel vindicated. The grading rewards places that stay clean, and it turns out people look for that. A restaurant with a Perfect Year badge is a restaurant you can take your mum to.

Nobody wants my opinion. The most common thing I get asked is “is this place safe?” and the honest answer is: here’s what the inspector wrote, here’s the date, here’s the link to the state’s own report. Decide. The moment I started rewriting findings so they read nicely, I’d be editing evidence. I don’t.

It costs five dollars a month. I’ll say that again because it’s the part I’m proudest of. One Cloudflare Worker, one database, one cron job that pulls the new inspections every night. Half a million visits on the same $5 plan I started with. No ads paid for it. No one’s data paid for it. Software doesn’t have to be expensive to be useful; it has to be finished.

What It Isn’t

It isn’t a hit job. Restaurants get named because the state names them. I publish the fines and I publish the badges, and a kitchen that cleans up its act gets that reflected the next morning, not next quarter.

It isn’t for sale. Nobody can pay to come off the list. Nobody can pay to move up it. The emails have started arriving — the angry kind, and the “can I get the badge on a sign” kind. The answer to the first is no, and it will keep being no. The second lot, hold that thought.

It isn’t done. The data updates nightly, the geocoding is at 89%, and I’m one person. If something’s wrong, the support link goes to me and nobody else.

What’s Next

The badge people are right. A kitchen that goes a full year without a single finding has done something genuinely hard, and it deserves more than a small green square on my website. So: printable certificates for clean kitchens, signed, dated, the kind of thing you’d actually put on a wall. No date promised, because I’ve met me. But it’s the next thing.

Half a million. Thank you for looking. Go check the place you’re eating tonight — eatsafelyinflorida.com — and if it’s got a badge, tell them. They earned it.