AllergyEats makes adding restaurants easier and increases current count by 32,000

Once again, you asked, we delivered.

While the AllergyEats database includes virtually every restaurant in America, it is inevitable that there will be some errors of omission and inclusion.  These errors most often occur due to the sheer size of the database (over 600,000) and the tremendous rate of new restaurant openings and closings each year (15-20% of all restaurants close annually!).  However, some restaurants are simply miscategorized by their national SIC code, and we of course also have own our occasional miscues.

A few months ago, we began adding new and deleting closed restaurants en masse on a more frequent basis as our first effort at improving the timeliness of database updates.  We are very happy with the success of this effort and, in fact, we just added another 32,000 this week!

Now, in response to your requests, we have completed our second major effort in this regard.  Starting immediately, we can add missing restaurants “on the fly.”  (The same goes for deleting closed restaurants.)

Over these first 7-1/2 months of AllergyEats’ existence, many of you have been nice enough to call our attention to restaurants that were missing from our database (using the Contact Me link on the left side of the AllergyEats home page).  To date, our only option has been to wait until the next database update and hope the restaurant was assigned the correct SIC code.  That wasn’t acceptable to me and I knew we needed to address this issue as quickly as possible.

And so we did.

This new feature once again improves the timeliness and integrity of the database and will cause an increase in the number of ratings as well.  It will also allow AllergyEats to include the very newest of restaurants, those that you often want to rate or review immediately.

Given the need to verify data, additions will be processed in-house.  So please continue to inform us of any potential errors you find via the Contact Us link.  As with rating restaurants, your help here is a great service to our entire community.  If you could give us a web address or other relevant information along with the restaurant name and town, that would be greatly appreciated, but not necessary.

While you’re thinking about it, please go to www.allergyeats.com right now and rate any restaurants you’ve dined at recently.  If you can’t find one, click Contact Us and we’ll look into and correct the problem quickly.  Remember that the more we all rate, the more valuable AllergyEats becomes for everyone dealing with food allergies and intolerances.