Five feet from the door, four to six feet up

The rules for posting your grade card are more specific than most operators realise, and they are enforced.

The position

The card goes on a front window, door or outside wall, where people passing by can easily see it.

It must be within five feet of the entrance customers use, and four to six feet off the ground.

If your premises has no direct entrance to the street, the Health Department decides where the card goes.

The penalties

Not posting a grade card: up to $1,000.

Posting it incorrectly: $200.

Repeated violations can cost you your permit.

Every card carries a serial number, and the Department tracks them. The wrong card in the window — an old one, a card from a previous cycle — is visible to the next inspector who walks past, before they have even come in.

The card has to be the real card

You cannot post a photocopy. You cannot post a fax or a print of a photo of it. The physical card the inspector or the tribunal issued is the one that goes up.

If yours is lost, stolen or damaged, call the Bureau of Food Safety and Community Sanitation and submit a notarised replacement form. The replacement comes to the establishment by certified mail.

When you have two cards

If a re-inspection put you at a B or a C, you were given both a grade card and a Grade Pending card. You choose which to post, and you can keep posting your choice until you have had your opportunity at the Health Tribunal.

That choice is genuinely yours and it is worth thinking about. Grade Pending tells a passer-by that the result is not settled. A B tells them it is.

After the hearing, the rules change immediately

If the hearing changed your grade, you get a new card. Post it and destroy both of the old ones.

If it did not change, or you accepted a settlement, post the card the inspector gave you and destroy the Grade Pending card.

If you missed your hearing, or you received a default decision: post the inspector's card and destroy the pending one. You were required to post it on the day you missed the hearing.

If you asked for an adjournment: on the first one you keep the choice. Ask for a second, or miss the second date, and you must post the card the inspector gave you.

The part that costs people money

A Grade Pending card left in the window after the hearing is decided is not a grey area. The obligation switches the day the decision comes, and the card in your window stops being the right one at that moment.

Put a note in your calendar for the hearing date with one line on it: change the card.