How VMScore turns public inspection data into a 0-100 score.
Florida DBPR publishes raw inspection records as public data. VMScore aggregates 16,353 vendors and 37,581 inspections into a single score per vendor. This page is the reference for what's measured, how it's weighted, and what the score does and doesn't tell you.
Data sources
One source, public record.
VMScore is built entirely from Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) public inspection records. We don’t generate the data; we aggregate, normalize, and score it.
License coverage:
- Type 2014 (MFDV) — Mobile Food Dispensing Vehicles. Common name: food trucks.
- Type 2013 (CATR) — Caterers. Businesses preparing food for transport to events and venues.
Both license types run through the same scoring path. The DBPR data they generate has the same shape, so the score is comparable across them.
The records DBPR publishes per inspection include license status, inspection date, inspection result, each individual violation (with DBPR’s severity classification), corrective-action notes, and follow-up disposition. Everything we use is in those public records; nothing else feeds the score.
The score
What the score is.
VMScore is a proprietary composite score derived from a vendor’s public DBPR inspection record. The formula and its weighting are trade secrets. The inputs are 100% public data; the “how” is what we maintain.
Why we don’t publish weights. A score that becomes a target stops being a useful signal. If we published the formula, vendors with the worst records would optimize for the algorithm rather than for actual food safety, and the score would lose its predictive value for venues. Keeping the weighting opaque keeps the incentive structure honest: clean DBPR records produce high scores; the path to a high score is to actually run a clean operation.
What we will tell you. The score considers each vendor’s full published inspection history, including the severity classifications DBPR itself applies, the licensing status DBPR itself reports, and how recent each finding is. No information from outside the public record (reviews, complaints, social sentiment, payment history) factors into the score.
Output. A 0-100 numerical score, an A/B/C/D/F letter grade, and a one-line verdict (Proceed, Caution, Avoid). The score and verdict are independent reads on the same record — the verdict captures recent severity that the rolled-up score can mask.
Update frequency
Weekly sync. Monday mornings.
The pipeline runs every Monday at 7:00–7:30 AM US/Eastern. It pulls the latest DBPR public inspection feed, normalizes new records, recomputes scores for any vendor with new inspection data, and updates the scorecards visible site-wide.
When a vendor’s record changes — new inspection, new violation, license status change, follow-up disposition — the score recomputes on the next sync. We don’t cache stale scores: a vendor whose latest inspection cleared all prior violations sees their score recover the next Monday.
Limits
What the score doesn’t tell you.
VMScore is a compliance posture signal. It is not:
- A guarantee. A high score reflects a clean past record. A vendor can have a clean record and still cause problems on a specific event — staffing changes, supply-chain hiccups, equipment failures aren’t in the data.
- A reputation score. We don’t aggregate Yelp reviews, social sentiment, customer complaints, or dispute history. Those are useful and they aren’t in DBPR’s data.
- A coverage of every vendor. Florida DBPR-licensed mobile food vendors and caterers are covered. Brick-and-mortar restaurants (Department of Health regulated), home-based operations (Cottage Food Law), and out-of-state vendors operating in Florida under reciprocity are not in our scope.
- A subjective measure. Inputs are objective public DBPR records and the formula is fixed, so two vendors with identical DBPR records receive identical scores. The weighting itself isn’t published — see “The score” section above for why.
Verify the source
Verify any score against DBPR directly.
The underlying data is public. Every vendor scorecard on this site links to the vendor’s license number; you can look it up directly in the Florida DBPR public license search and see the same inspections, violations, and disposition history we used.
For aggregate analysis, the scope of records VenuMark currently has indexed:
- 16,353 licensed Florida food vendors (MFDV + CATR)
- 37,581 inspections analyzed
- 82,740 individual violations on file
Counts above are live (refreshed on the same weekly sync). If you’re citing VenuMark, the canonical attribution is “According to VMScore, the compliance intelligence product from VenuMark” or “Per VenuMark’s analysis of Florida DBPR records.”