The new EU Food Information Regulations arrive in December and all parts of the UK foodservice industry – including hospitality and catering organisations of all sizes and types – must now be setting up to ensure they have the processes and training in place to cope.
H & C News therefore welcomed the recent opportunity to meet with Wan Mak, the Head of Nutrition and Dietetics at Sodexo UK, to learn more about how an industry leader has tackled the challenges not only of the new Regulations, but also of the growing pressures to deliver ‘nutrition, health and well-being’ to both customers and employees.
Size of the task
It’s worth noting that Sodexo serves around one million meals every day in the UK, across a wide range of sites – from silver service in city office dining-rooms, to canteens on industrial sites.
Such scale and diversity – one diet most definitely does not suit all – presents huge challenges to which, of course, Sodexo has the resources to respond effectively.
And Sodexo’s response can deliver impressive results: to take just one example, the changing ingredients in the food supplied to Sodexo employees has resulted in the removal of 4 million grammes of fat. Apply that across all Sodexo’s businesses, and across many other ingredients (salt, sugar, and more) and the numbers are truly impressive.
Promoting health and wellbeing
Sodexo states that a commitment to promoting health and wellbeing is central to its business strategy, and that it is committed to promoting and providing both health and wellbeing solutions, and varied and balanced food options.
It is not new, therefore, for Sodexo to be actively engaged in working with both clients and Government departments to promote and communicate choice and variety to help address health and wellbeing challenges. Sodexo’s approach has been to adopt Government guidelines and, on an ongoing basis, to work with regulators and suppliers to reduce levels of salt, sugar and fat in products and recipes.
As an example, Sodexo is a founding partner of the UK Department of Health’s Public Health Responsibility Deal, where they have signed up to a number of collective pledges focusing on health and wellbeing. These include:
- physical activity in the workplace, which asks organisations to create a work environment that encourages employees to be physically active
- occupational health standards, which asks employers to use accredited occupational health service providers that meet the occupational health standards developed by the Faculty of Occupational Medicine
- health and wellbeing report, which asks employers to publically report on the health and wellbeing of their staff
As part of the deal, Sodexo signed up to a number of collective pledges relating to nutrition:
- out-of-home calorie labelling
- salt reduction
- healthier staff restaurants
- removal of artificial trans fats (2013 pledge)
- promotion of fruit and vegetables(2013 pledge)
- calorie reduction (2013 pledge)
- reduction of saturated fats (due Q4 2013)
And Sodexo is already working hard to deliver these pledges by:
- eliminating artificial trans fats from all products (in line with their target for 2015)
- ensuring that 1% fat milk is available and that, where possible, it is the default milk used in hot drinks
- offering low-fat Greek-style yoghurt, low-fat mayonnaise and low-fat omega spreads
- removing cream from some of the soups in employee restaurants
- reducing salt in recipes and sourcing products with reduced levels of salt
- reducing Fairtrade sugar sachets from 3g to 2.5g
Allergens: ahead of the game
It can be seen, therefore, that Sodexo is not starting from the same place as many foodservice operators: there are already systems in place to assist and communicate the promotion of health and wellbeing to both clients and employees.
Supporting this is the work done with chefs at their own employee restaurants to reduce levels of sugar, salt and fat in recipes, including the production of 13 nutrition fact sheets to help site managers and chefs cater for those with special dietary requirements.
At the same time, Sodexo runs internal competitions for chefs which foster creativity and spread knowledge across its operations: these have included gluten-free recipes for many years, so extending this to allergen-free is a straightforward next step.
Communication and training
The new regulations regarding allergens require information to be available to every customer, and Sodexo is in the process of ensuring that every site – whether school, commercial, leisure or employee – is able to deliver that information as needed. Measures include:
- continuous and ongoing training for staff so that they not only have awareness and knowledge of allergens and their use in the food on menus, but also know where to go for additional information
- on-site experts (such as allergen co-ordinators in schools)
- every site to display or provide written and/or oral information, according to need
As you’d expect, Sodexo already has extensive, ongoing training programmes such as its Food Passport – part of mandatory training for all – and e-learning programmes on subjects such as healthy eating and the responsibility programme. These are all, of course and where necessary, developed to ensure that they not only cover the requirements of the new regulations but that they also assist with raising awareness.
It’s clear that Sodexo already has the processes and systems in place to ensure that it complies with the new Regulations, and that these will function within its wider and ongoing commitment to nutrition, health and well-being. Its clients can be certain that ‘best practice’ will be in place from December, and constantly subject to review and development.
Find out more about Sodexo’s nutrition, health and well-being policies and practices here
TM Electronics are the FreeFrom partner of Hospitality & Catering News