Shortly after our recent cover story about food safety, Toronto Public Health has started to make finding the health-inspection record of local restaurants and food vendors a little easier.
This past Monday (Feb. 6), health inspectors started issuing new signs to some of the premises they checked. For the first time, these ones display a QR code, which means that passersby with smartphones can launch a QR app (like this iPhone one) to be directed straight to the DineSafe site, where up to two years’ worth of detailed inspection results can be found for any one of the 17,298 establishments in Toronto that prepare and serve food.
For now, the QR codes aren’t individualized for each of the places that get one, which means that you’ll still have to put in a name or address on the DineSafe website, and that HackLab’s DineSafe free iPhone app or mobile-optimized site, which both use the same data, aren’t worth forgetting about just yet. “That’s not something that we’re able to do,” says Jim Chan, the head of the food-safety program, about whether the codes might be customized in the future, though he’s hopeful that they will be. “We’re not there yet.”
