inspections
Citizen, but for restaurants
If you've used Citizen for street-level safety alerts in your neighborhood, you already understand the product shape. Panko Alerts is Citizen for the regulatory side of restaurants — real-time pushes about what's happening with the kitchens near you (or near your kitchen, if you operate one). Same mental model, different domain.
What the two products have in common
Both Citizen and Panko Alerts use the same core architecture: radius-based push notifications, real-time public-data ingestion, freemium model, hyperlocal filtering, map-able events, web + iOS. Both products bet that 'what's happening near me right now' is a more useful frame than 'what's happening generally.' Both lean on public/government data sources rather than user-generated content. Both deliver value through the push notification, not through people opening the app.
What's different
Citizen covers public safety incidents — crime, fires, missing persons — and serves a general consumer audience. Panko Alerts covers food safety and restaurant regulatory data — FDA recalls, CDC outbreaks, DOH inspections — and serves two audiences: diners (free) and restaurant operators (Pro). Citizen's content includes user-submitted eyewitness reports; Panko's content is government data only, with zero user-generated layer. Citizen runs nationwide in major U.S. cities; Panko's inspection coverage is currently NYC, Chicago, SF, and Boston — with more cities as our data partnerships expand. Inspection Radar specifically (the Pro feature) is the closest functional parallel to Citizen's core 'incidents near you' loop.
Why this framing helps operators
Most operators don't think of regulatory risk as 'something that happens to other restaurants near me' — they think of it as 'something that happens to me one day.' The Citizen frame changes that. Inspectors are working zones; recalls move through distributors; outbreaks cluster geographically. The risks you face are the risks happening to your neighbors right now, and you don't have a real-time feed unless you build one. We built one. $4.99/mo. Cancel anytime. No claims about whether you'll be inspected next — just a real-time feed of what's actually happening near you, the way Citizen surfaces what's actually happening on your block.
Start free for diners, Pro for operators
Real-time food safety alerts from 25+ government sources. AI-scored by urgency. Less than one bad meal a month — $4.99/mo.
Start free trial → alerts.getpanko.app