About Us

In April 2023, Ecolab acquired Hazel Analytics. Hazel Analytics now operates within the EcoSure division, further strengthening our capabilities and ability to help clients mitigate brand risk, and optimize guest experience and food safety.

Our mission is to improve public health through data-driven technology that effectively informs and connects food service operators, consumers, regulators, and industry providers to drive action.

Hazel's impact today

Today we're proud to be a fast-growing food tech company fulfilling its mission to create innovative products that transform the way organizations across industries use food safety data. We are the proven market leader in health department data analytics, serving over half of the 100 largest food service and retail brands. Our customers rely on Hazel technology to proactively monitor food safety and regulatory compliance at over 300,000 locations that serve millions of meals every day in the US and Canada.

236
global food service / retail brands
use Hazel products
53
of the 100 largest chains
use Hazel products
1.9m
inspections
collected in 2021
4.8m
violations
recorded in 2021
We are also the global provider of health department data technology to Ecolab (NYSE: ECL), a global leader in food safety products and services. Ecolab won the Kitchen Innovation Award at the 2019 National Restaurant Show for their Advanced Health Department Intelligence program that is powered by Hazel's technology.

Our History

2014
Hazel Analytics incorporates, licensing innovation from UCLA and the University of Maryland
2015
Releases Food Safety Insights (FSI) beta product and obtains first customers
2016
Gains traction with FSI as leading national brands utilize the platform (over 4,000 customer locations monitored)
Wins the 2016 Food Safety Innovation Award by Jack in the Box
2017
Becomes Ecolab's exclusive worldwide partner for health department technology
Continues to gain traction with FSI, adding Target as the first food retail customer (now monitoring over 6,000 customer locations)
Adds Canada health inspection data to the Hazel platform
Moves headquarters from southern California to Seattle
2018
Counts 100 major national and global brands as users, monitoring over 100,000 locations
Co-presents with customer Jack in the Box at the February 2018 NEHA conference
Adds 2 of the top 3 biggest food service companies in the world as customers: Starbucks and Subway
Breaks ground on the next-generation FSI platform
2019
Wins 2019 Food Marketing Institute Food Safety Innovation Award (in support of Target)
Wins 2019 Sani Professional Food Safety Program Innovation Award (in support of The Cheesecake Factory)
Releases Delivery Partner Oversight Platform (DPOP) product for the food delivery industry
Adds United Kingdom health inspection data to the Hazel platform
2020
Adds Instacart as first food retail delivery customer for DPOP
Counts 200 major national and global brands as users
Included on Built In Seattle’s list of Best Places to Work
Adds Uber Eats as first restaurant delivery customer for DPOP
Publishes white paper on health department data best practices
Launches free guidance resource with aggregated local COVID-19 ordinances across the US
2021
Commences partnership with Yelp
Introduces Corrective Action Management workflow product
Introduces industry-first predictive analytics capability
Served on the technology committee of the 2021 Conference for Food Protection
Presented at the 2021 NEHA Annual conference
2022
Named to Built In Seattle's list of Best Places to Work for third year in a row
Launches Hazel-powered health scores on the Yelp platform

Our research roots

Hazel Analytics is the direct product of university research that dates back more than twenty years. Future Hazel co-founders Phil Leslie and Ginger Jin were rising economists at UCLA in 1999 when they conducted their famous study (later published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics) on the introduction of restaurant grade cards in Los Angeles County, one of the first major U.S. metros to do so. Given the wide reception of the study in both academia and the private sector, Phil and Ginger continued on with several more projects involving local health departments. Unfortunately, they were prevented from doing any work on a national scale, given that food safety regulation is a highly decentralized function in the U.S. In 2011 they set out to change this by obtaining research funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create the first standardized national database of health inspection results, enlisting future Hazel co-founder Ben Bederson, then Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, to help architect the technology infrastructure needed to do such data collection at scale.

With a preliminary database built and the research period coming to an end, the three collaborators were interested in opportunities to maintain the research output for the benefit of public health. In 2013 they brought in Arash Nasibi, then a UCLA MBA student, to explore options for extending the life of the project. Arash quickly discovered that there was a significant need for visibility and analytics related to health inspection outcomes in food service and retail, especially within large national and global brands. With these findings the team was encouraged by the potential to address such critical pain points in the industry, so they decided to commercialize the research by forming Hazel Analytics in October 2014.

Why Hazel Analytics as our name?

According to Celtic folklore, the hazel tree is associated with hidden knowledge, so we thought it would make for a befitting name and logo.