What Sacramento's Green, Yellow and Red Placards Actually Say

Sacramento County puts a coloured card by the door of every place that sells food, and most people read it as a traffic light: green good, yellow doubtful, red bad. The county’s own definitions are narrower than that, and the narrow reading is the useful one. Green is not a clean sheet. It is a line, and most inspections land on the right side of it.

In the records this site counts, 7.9% of 16,262 routine food inspections of restaurants and food preparation establishments ended in a yellow or red placard. The rest ended in green.

What each colour allows

The county states the rule in one place. It “requires food facilities to post a Green (‘Pass’), Yellow (‘Conditional Pass’) or Red (‘Closed’) placard within 5 feet of the main entrance,” and “the placard summarizes the results of the most recent inspection.”

Green: “No more than one (1) major violation (corrected during the inspection) was observed. Minor violations, if any, are required to be corrected within the time frame indicated on the inspection report.” Read that closely. A green placard allows one major violation, as long as it was fixed while the inspector was there, and it allows any number of minor ones.

Yellow: “Two (2) or more major violations were observed that required immediate correction and a follow-up inspection that will be conducted within 24 to 72 hours.” The restaurant stays open. The second visit, a day or three later, is the consequence.

Red: “Closure is required when an imminent danger to public health and safety is observed. Examples include surfacing sewage, no hot water, rodent/insect infestation, or severe unsanitary conditions.” Red is not “more violations than yellow.” It is a different kind of finding: a condition that cannot wait for a follow-up.

What an inspection is looking for

The department describes the visit itself plainly. “Primarily, we inspect the food facility to determine if it complies with the requirements of the California Health and Safety Code.” An inspection can be narrow or wide: “Sometimes an inspection is confined to a specific problem resulting from a complaint, and at other times the inspection may be very comprehensive.” Either way, “all inspections are conducted with the intent to observe conditions which may contribute to food-borne illness,” and “all problems noted during the inspection are brought to the attention of the management and violations are pursued to correction.”

Routine visits are not announced. “The food facility does not usually know when the specialist will be conducting routine inspections or complaint investigations. Follow-up and permit inspections may be scheduled in advance.” That difference is one reason this site counts routine inspections only. A follow-up is scheduled, expected and exists because of an earlier finding, so counting it would count the same problem twice and mix announced visits with unannounced ones.

“Food facility” is wider than “restaurant”

The county’s file covers far more than restaurants, and the county says why: a food facility is “an operation that stores, prepares, packages, serves, vends, or otherwise provides food for human consumption at the retail level,” which takes in “restaurants as well as markets, bakeries, liquor stores, bars, certified farmers’ market, food service at fairs and festivals, catering trucks, hot dog carts, ice cream trucks, produce vehicles, and retail stores that sell prepackaged food.”

A fast-food chain belongs next to other restaurants, not next to liquor stores and produce trucks, so the county rate on this site covers only facilities the county permits as restaurants or food preparation establishments. There is a wrinkle. The county’s file lists a report once for every permit a facility holds and does not say which permit the report was for. A supermarket with a deli counter holds a market permit and a restaurant permit, and one report appears under both. Since there is no telling which it belongs to, places that hold a restaurant permit alongside another kind are left out of the county rate. No chain restaurant was affected.

One visit, sometimes two reports

Looking up a restaurant in the county’s records can turn up two reports from the same day with results that seem to disagree: a “Pass” and a “Minor Violations”, say. They are two different reports. One is the food inspection, which ends in a placard. The other comes from a separate county programme that words its results differently (“In Compliance”, “Minor Violations”, “Critical Violations”). This site counts the placard reports only. Treating the two as one inspection is an easy mistake; we made it ourselves on the first pass, and the rates added up to more than 100 percent.

Reading the chain figures

9 chains have enough routine inspections to chart in Sacramento County. 8 sit clearly under the county rate, 1 is too close to call, and none sits clearly over it.

Those positions rest on very few placards. 4 of the 9 chains have three or fewer yellow or red placards on file across the whole period. That is enough to say a chain is under a 7.9% rate, because its range stops short of it. It is not enough to say one chain does better than another: their ranges overlap almost entirely, and a single placard would move any of them. It also says nothing about the restaurant nearest you, whose own record is on the county’s site.

Sources

• Sacramento County Environmental Management Department, Business Owner/Operator Food Facility: frequently asked questions — the placard definitions, what an inspection covers, which visits are announced, and the definition of a food facility.
• Sacramento County 311, What does the Green (“Pass”) placard in a restaurant mean? — the same definitions, with the county’s own date of last update.
• Chain figures are computed from the same committed snapshot as the Sacramento County page; the method is on the methodology page.

Informational only. This is a reading of public inspection records, not food-safety, legal or dining advice, and no figure here is a grade of any individual restaurant. A figure describes what inspectors recorded across a set of visits in one place over one period — not a brand, and not the location near you.

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Against Sacramento County Environmental Management Department's published answers on inspections and placards.