Success Stories

In 2019, Hazel collaborated with the Minnesota Star Tribune on a report highlighting the progress of major metros toward online disclosure. Now, the City of Minneapolis has become the first city in the State of Minnesota to launch an online public health inspection search portal. By enhancing visibility and actionability for many restaurant, grocery, and food delivery companies through Hazel's platform, online inspection records will improve food safety for the city's residents and visitors.

Since we have our own roots in university research, we're always excited to collaborate with researchers. When Harvard Business School researchers Maria Ibanez and Mike Toffel needed health department data to study the impact of scheduling on inspection outcomes, they turned to Hazel. The ensuing research was originally published in the Harvard Business Review before being picked up by multiple news outlets.

We're eager to help accelerate the increasingly popular practice of local governments making their health inspection data readily accessible online. Eric Roper, a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune, shares this enthusiasm in his January 2019 piece that puts a spotlight on Minnesota for being the only state in the union that has no online reporting. We were happy to provide data to Eric and his team, and collaborate with them on the analysis.

Few people think about the food safety challenges specific to sports stadiums and arenas, where thousands of fans need to be fed in a short period of time as they cheer on their favorite teams. ESPN reporter Paula Lavigne did a wildly popular piece for Outside The Lines highlighting these challenges, and ranking the food safety track record of all major professional sports stadiums in North America. ESPN collaborated with Hazel, leveraging our expertise in collecting and analyzing health inspection data, to produce the robust and detailed analysis.

Hazel Analytics was born out of research conducted in large part at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In 2018, the school interviewed Hazel CEO Arash Nasibi on how he turned this university research into a thriving business with a mission to improve public health through its technology.