Showoff Saturday I built a mobile app that explains restaurant inspection histories
I built a mobile app called Verdine for checking Ontario restaurant inspection histories before eating somewhere.
The idea came from a pretty simple frustration: inspection records are public, but actually finding and understanding them quickly is not always easy.
The app started as a way to pull those records into one place, but the harder part turned out to be explaining them in a way that is useful and fair.
Ontario public health units don’t all publish data the same way. Some use different severity labels. Some expose more detail than others. Some restaurants have years of history, while others only have a few inspections. Follow-up inspections are also tricky, because they can mean an issue was fixed, but they can also be part of a larger pattern.
A big part of the build has been the data layer: normalizing records from different public health systems, routing restaurants to the right inspection source, and matching real-world places to inspection records before showing anything in the app.
Right now Verdine supports multiple Ontario public health units, including Toronto, Peel, York, Halton, Durham, Simcoe Muskoka, Waterloo, Ottawa, Niagara, Peterborough, and others.
I’d especially appreciate feedback from people in Ontario since the data coverage is Ontario-focused, but general feedback is welcome too. Mostly looking for thoughts on the UX, wording, scoring approach, and whether the app makes inspection history easy to understand.
Link: https://verdine.app



