What Inspectors Actually Look For

A Chicago health inspection takes 45 minutes to two hours. Inspector shows up unannounced. FDA-derived checklist. About 45 items. They are not weighted equally.

Critical vs. Non-Critical

Fourteen of the 45 items are critical — can directly cause foodborne illness. Food temperature, employee hygiene, contamination, pest evidence. Critical violation means correct it now or face enforcement.

Non-critical — missing thermometer, unlabeled container — get written up but don't trigger failure alone. You can accumulate a lot and still pass.

Critical violations are defined as provisions whose violation is most likely to contribute to foodborne illness or injury.

Complete violation code dictionary

The Walk-Through

Start at the back. Cold storage first — everything at 41°F or below. Anything higher is a Code 21.

Hot line next. Cooked food held for service at 135°F or above. The gap between 41 and 135 is the danger zone. Rice at 95 degrees is a Code 22. Bacteria doubles every 20 minutes in that range.

Then: hand washing, cross-contamination, cutting board sanitation, sanitizer concentrations, surface cleanliness. Last: pest evidence, door seals, plumbing. Where Code 33 and Code 38 show up.

Time-temperature abuse is consistently the leading contributing factor in foodborne illness outbreaks traced to food service establishments.

Cold holding violation (Code 21) | Rodent evidence (Code 33)

What Gets You Failed

No fixed formula. But certain findings almost always do it: food temperatures way out of range, active pest infestation, sewage backup, no hot water, sick employee handling food.

One cooler at 43 degrees? Conditional pass. Three coolers out of range plus mouse droppings plus no food manager on site? Done for the day. About 19% of inspections fail.

What 'Pass with Conditions' means | What happens after a failure

Read the Comments

Code 33 could mean "3 mouse droppings near rear exit" or "approximately 150 droppings behind prep coolers and inside equipment." Same code. One is a gap in the door seal. The other is a serious problem.

Codes tell you the category. Comments tell you what happened. One inspection is a snapshot. The pattern across five is the story. All on Chispections.

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