Chefs across BaxterStorey’s hospitality locations have been recognised for making it easier for customers to eat healthily. Following a rigorous assessment of menu choice, cooking methods, ingredients and marketing, BaxterStorey’s Healthy Me initiative has received a gold ‘Eat Out, Eat Well’ award.
The award, which is backed by local councils, aims to encourage food businesses to provide healthier options to customers through the use of healthier catering practices, increasing fruit, vegetables and healthy starches and decreasing fat, sugar and salt.
BaxterStorey introduced ‘Healthy Me’ to enable staff to substitute unhealthy snacks with wholesome, nutritious alternatives. Award assessors praised BaxterStorey for its innovation in menu creation and marketing of the Healthy Me initiative, which incorporates hydration stations featuring infused waters, homemade sourdough and lighter snacks such as lentil chips, edamame pots and bircher muesli.
As well as grilling, baking and steaming foods where possible, BaxterStorey chefs were praised for increasing the number of wholegrain and raw vegetables options in their dishes and providing healthy replacements to popular dishes such as poached fish on ‘Fish Fridays’.
Gabriella Roberts, nutritionist at BaxterStorey, explained: “Food is essential to a productive workplace and providing staff with healthier food options is becoming increasingly important to our clients. Healthy eating is about education and choice. This is exactly what our Healthy Me initiative is all about. Our chef development teams work hard to ensure our food is fresh, seasonal, of good provenance and interesting to keep customers engaged.
“Achieving the ‘Eat Out, Eat Well’ award is a great recognition of all the creative initiatives that we are implementing across our locations in order to make healthy eating more accessible and exciting. From guidance on nutrition and healthy food swaps to creating take-away recipes, Healthy Me is a constantly evolving initiative that is tailored to each client.”