What Michigan health inspectors actually look at

Inspections feel arbitrary if you don't know the framework. They aren't. Inspectors are working from a risk-based structure, and the weight sits heavily on a handful of factors known to actually cause foodborne illness. Everything else matters less. The risk factors carrying the most weight Temperature control. Cold holding, hot holding, cooking temperatures, cooling, and reheating. Cooling is where operators get caught most often — a large batch of stock or chili put in the walk-in whole passes through the danger zone slowly enough to be a real problem, and it's a violation whether or not anyone got sick. Employee health and hygiene. Handwashing facilities that are stocked, accessible, and actually used. A sick-employee policy that exists and is followed. Bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food. Cross-contamination. Raw over ready-to-eat in the cooler. Cutting board and utensil separation. Sanitizer at the right concentration — and a test strip on hand to prove it. Approved sources. Food from licensed suppliers, with the documentation to show it. Certified manager on staff. Which is the paperwork side of the same idea: someone here is trained to run this correctly. What matters less than people think Cosmetic condition. A scuffed floor or a dated dining room is not what an inspector is scoring. A spotless dining room attached to a walk-in holding at 47°F is a bad inspection. How to prepare without pretending The operators who do well aren't the ones who deep-clean the night before. They're the ones whose thermometers are calibrated, whose cooling logs are filled in because someone actually fills them in, and whose staff wash their hands the same way whether or not anyone is watching. Two practical habits carry most of the weight. Keep a working thermometer and use it on a schedule. Write things down — cooling times, sanitizer checks, unit temperatures. A log an inspector can read is a demonstration that the system runs when they're not there, and that's the thing they're actually trying to assess. In metro Detroit, results are public. Detroit posts them and summarizes each on the placard in the window; Macomb County publishes a searchable database by ZIP code. Your inspection isn't a private conversation — it's a customer-facing document.