What Florida inspectors actually write about most
We hold 2,136,363 findings in the inspectors' own words. The single most common one is not what anybody expects, and the second is floors.
Ask anyone what a health inspector finds and you will hear the same answer: roaches, rats, something crawling.
We hold every finding Florida inspectors have written since July 2023 — 2,136,363 of them, word for word. Here is what they are actually about.
The top eight
- Food contact surfaces, damaged or badly maintained — 182,511 findings (8.5%). Torn cooler gaskets, cracked cutting boards, chipped containers.
- Floors — 169,253 (7.9%). Not clean, not properly constructed, not draining.
- Food contact surfaces, dirty — 163,741 (7.7%). The slicer, the can opener, the ice machine.
- Cross-contamination, lower tier — 97,766 (4.6%)
- Non-food contact surfaces, dirty — 90,163 (4.2%). Shelving, vents, the outside of equipment.
- Toilets and handwashing facilities — 89,473 (4.2%)
- Cross-contamination, high priority — 70,671 (3.3%). Raw chicken over ready-to-eat food.
- Plumbing — 68,131 (3.2%)
The thing worth noticing
Look at the second item. Floors are 7.9% of every finding in the state, and not one of them is classed high priority. A dirty floor is a real finding and a fair one, but Florida does not think it is how you get ill.
Now look at cross-contamination at 3.3%. Of those 70,671 findings, 70,646 are high priority — essentially all of them. That is the category that matters, and it is less than half as common as floors.
This is the whole argument for reading a record rather than a number. Two restaurants with six findings each can be in completely different situations: one has scuffed floors and a cracked lid, the other stored raw shell eggs over cut lettuce. The count is identical. The risk is not remotely.
So what do you actually do with that
When you open a restaurant's page here, the findings are sorted with the high-priority ones first, and each carries its tier in plain words. That is deliberate. The state's own report orders findings by citation number, which puts a dusty ceiling vent above live roaches purely because 36 comes after 35.
Read the top two or three. If they are floors and gaskets, you have learned something reassuring. If they are temperatures and raw meat, you have learned something else.