WAREWASHING FACILITIES: INSTALLED, MAINTAINED & USED; TEST STRIPS.
Cited at 4,220 of 56,625 graded Chicago inspections — 7.5% of them, the 16th most common violation in the city. Inspections citing it fail 71.3% of the time against a 27.5% baseline, making it a strong signal.
What it means
Violation 48 appears on the Chicago Department of Public Health’s inspection checklist as “Warewashing Facilities: Installed, Maintained & Used; Test Strips.” Its position on that form places it in the core band — the city does not publish a severity field, so this is inferred from the code number, which is how the form itself is ordered.
Core violations concern facility maintenance, cleanliness and paperwork. They rarely fail an inspection on their own, and they are by far the most commonly cited.
How much it actually matters
Ranked by how often it is written up, violation 48 is 16th of 50. Ranked by how strongly it predicts a failure, it is 5th. It matters considerably more than its frequency suggests, which makes it easy to overlook on a busy report.
Other core violations
Violation 48 FAQ
What is violation 48 in a Chicago health inspection?
Violation 48, "Warewashing Facilities: Installed, Maintained & Used; Test Strips", is one of the numbered items on the Chicago Department of Public Health's inspection checklist. By its position on that form it falls in the core band. Core violations concern facility maintenance, cleanliness and paperwork. They rarely fail an inspection on their own, and they are by far the most commonly cited.
Is violation 48 serious?
Measured against outcomes, it is a strong signal. Inspections citing violation 48 ended in a failure 71.3% of the time, against a 27.5% baseline across 56,625 graded Chicago inspections — 2.6× ordinary risk. That places it among the strongest predictors of a failed inspection in the whole dataset.
How common is violation 48?
It is the 16th most-cited violation in Chicago, appearing at 4,220 of 56,625 graded inspections since 2022 — 7.5% of them.
Can a restaurant fail an inspection for violation 48 alone?
Rarely. Core violations do not normally cause a failure by themselves. When an inspection citing this item fails, something more serious was usually cited at the same visit.
Sources
- City of Chicago — Food Inspections dataset (4ijn-s7e5)Every record referenced on this page.
- Chicago Department of Public Health — Restaurant InspectionHow inspections are conducted and how violations are classified.
How these figures were calculated
The city publishes the records but not these rates. They were derived from 56,625 inspections since 2022 with a graded result of Pass, Pass w/ Conditions or Fail, with each violation string parsed for its leading code number. The rate above is the share of inspections citing violation 48 that ended in a failure. A single inspection commonly cites several violations, so codes are not mutually exclusive. Anyone can reproduce this from the dataset linked above.
Independent service — not affiliated with the City of Chicago, Cook County, or any restaurant. Health inspection data sourced directly from the City of Chicago's public Food Inspections open-data feed (data.cityofchicago.org, dataset 4ijn-s7e5), rebuilt from the live feed on every deploy. Neighborhood is derived from ZIP code and is approximate.