About Us

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.

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 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.