How to report a food safety problem in San Antonio

Which agency gets your report

Texas changed the rules on 1 July 2026. House Bill 2844 moved mobile food vendor licensing from local health departments to the state, under the new 25 TAC Chapter 226. What did not move is everything that stands still: a prep room, a walk‑in, a commissary kitchen. Those are still the city’s.

So if what concerns you is a truck, that is a state matter now. If it is the place the food is prepared or stored, that is the city. If it is both — a truck loading out of a room that should not be a kitchen — file both. They are different files at different agencies, and neither one will open the other.

Reporting the building to 311

Four ways in, all of them the same queue: call 3‑1‑1, use the website, use the 311SA app, or open the request form directly. The city’s case data shows web and phone are both used heavily for this complaint type, so pick whichever you will actually finish.

1. Choose one service type, not three

   Ask for Food Sales Without Permit. It is the strongest opener because it is binary and checkable — a permit record either exists for that address or it does not, and that takes an inspector seconds rather than judgement. Splitting your report across three service types risks three separate partial inspections instead of one thorough one.

2. Put everything else in the description field

   Contamination, ventilation, sanitation, the route food travels — all of it belongs in the narrative of that one request. An officer inspecting a site documents any other violations visible while they are there, so one well-described complaint reaches further than three thin ones.

3. Say when, not just where

   An inspector who arrives at the wrong hour sees an empty yard and closes the case. If the activity only happens at certain times — a truck loading out in the morning, a delivery on Thursdays — that detail is worth more than any other single thing you can add.

4. Decide about your name before you submit

   The anonymous option is real and it is on the same screen. What it costs is set out below. Decide deliberately rather than by default, because you cannot add your contact details to an anonymous case afterwards.

Reporting anonymously

You can report anonymously to City 311. This is stated on three separate City pages: the 311SA app FAQ, the app’s own submission instructions, and Development Services’ code enforcement process page. The city’s stated reason for allowing it is “so as not to deter” people from reporting at all.

Two different toggles appear at submission and they do different things. Private keeps your request off the public feed but does not anonymise you to the city. Anonymous keeps your identity from being attached to the case. You can select either or both.

It is not free, though, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you a worse outcome than you expect:

One partial offset: inspection results become public regardless of how the complaint was filed. Even with no case updates, you can look up the address yourself afterwards on the Metro Health inspection portal and see whether an inspection happened and what it found.

Our reading, for what it is worth: your contact details go to the city, not to the business. But if anonymity is the difference between reporting and not reporting, report anonymously. A filed anonymous report beats an unfiled signed one.

Report what you saw, not what you concluded

This is the part most people get wrong, and it is the difference between a complaint that gets worked and one that gets closed. A complaint is not an accusation and you are not being asked to prove anything. Deciding whether a rule was broken is the inspector’s job, and it is a job they are better at than either of us.

So describe what you observed. “I saw raw chicken carried across an open yard” is strong. “They are violating §7‑202.12” is weaker — it invites the agency to evaluate your legal conclusion instead of your observation, and if your citation is off, the whole report looks careless. You do not need to establish that a rule was broken in order to file. The agency pulls the permit and parcel records instantly. That is their job, not yours.

If you do not know something, say you do not know. That is a useful answer and an inspector will read it as a careful one.

What actually helps

• The exact street address — and which building or door, if the lot has more than one. A street number alone is not much help on a large parcel.
• The name on the truck, plus any permit decal or licence number visible on it. This is what lets the state match it to a licence record, or find that there is not one.
• When it operates — the hours the truck is actually on site, or when the activity happens.
• Where you saw what you saw — the prep room, the cooler, the path food takes between them.
• Photographs, if you have any you took lawfully. The 311SA app accepts attachments.

One thing this page is not. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here concludes that any business has done anything wrong. Only Metro Health, DSHS, or Development Services can inspect a site and make a finding. We are describing how to hand them something they can act on.

The city’s own numbers say yes

We read San Antonio’s published 311 case data for health and sanitation, covering 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2026, and pulled every case filed under Food Sales Without Permit — the service type this page recommends.

A realistic expectation, then: an inspector looking within about a week, most likely within three days. That is a responsive queue by any standard, and it is the strongest argument on this page for bothering to file at all.

One caveat on the target figure. The six-day target above comes from the SLA_Date field the city records against each case — it is the city’s own operational target as recorded per case. We could not find an ordinance or policy document publishing that standard, so read it as “the city’s case data shows a six-day target and a three-day median”, not as a guarantee of six days.

The document that cannot exist

Worth knowing if a truck is involved. Under the new state rules, a food vending vehicle has to carry certain paperwork on board and produce it at inspection. One item on that list is the inspection report for its central preparation facility — the commissary kitchen where the food is actually prepped and the truck is serviced.

The useful property of that requirement is what happens when the commissary is not permitted: the document cannot exist. There is no inspection report for a kitchen nobody has ever inspected. It is not a matter of opinion or a judgement call an inspector has to weigh — either the report is produced or it is not, and asking for it settles the question in about thirty seconds. You do not need to mention the citation when you report. The inspector knows it. But it is worth understanding why the building half of your report matters even when the truck looks fine.

Sources

Everything on this page comes from primary sources: the City of San Antonio’s 311 and Metro Health pages, Development Services’ code enforcement process page, the Texas DSHS retail food and mobile food vendor pages, the adopted text of 25 TAC Chapter 226, and the city’s published 311 case data for health and sanitation. Where a fact could not be confirmed from one of those, we have said so on this page rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

Agencies change phone numbers and forms. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it. Checked August 21, 2026.