Bon Appetit Management prides itself on staying ahead of culinary trends. In 1999, the food-service firm, which manages cafes at U.S. universities, museums and high-profile companies including Google and Twitter, implemented a farm-to-fork program that mandated chefs buy 20 percent of their ingredients locally. In 2005, it required that all its eggs be Certified Humane. Three years ago, it was the first in its field to sign a deal with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay Florida tomato pickers a higher wage and to guarantee better working conditions for them.
But when clients started asking for nutrition information, company executives were stumped. Bon Appetit serves 500 locations in 32 states. Unlike most food-service companies, its chefs don’t follow corporate recipes or menu cycles that schedule meatloaf on Mondays and tilapia on Tuesdays. They cook based on what is fresh and in season. Moreover, executives weren’t sure that standard nutrition information — labels that list calories, grams of saturated fat and milligrams of sodium — were doing much to make Americans healthier. According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1980, the number of Americans who are overweight or obese has more than doubled, from 15 percent to 36 percent.
Bon Appetit’s solution was to develop its own program that generates a “well-being score” that rates the healthfulness of its prepared food. It looks like a twisty arrow and is posted, along with calorie counts, next to the name of each dish on menus at each cafe station. If the arrow is green, the dish is full of whole grains, fruits and vegetables and low in fat, sodium and sugar. If it isn’t or is only partially colored, diners looking for a healthful meal might want to choose something else. This fall, the company is piloting the system at Duke and Case Western Reserve universities.
Since August when the scores were first posted, the response has been enthusiastic. At Case Western in Cleveland, an overwhelming majority of students reported in a dining services survey last month that they prefer Bon Appetit’s well-being score over traditional nutrition labels.
No wonder. Bon Appetit’s system is the Goldilocks of food labels: There’s not too much information to confuse consumers. But there’s not so little as to be meaningless. In place of percentages and long lists of ingredients is an easy, instant visual distillation of healthfulness.
To develop its system, Bon Appetit asked chefs and registered dietitians a basic question. In a perfect world, what information do people need to make good decisions about what to eat?
The answer: a score that puts the dish in context and makes it easy to compare it with other options. Most people, with the exception of those with allergies or serious health ailments, don’t want to know exactly how much fat or salt is in that white pizza with shrimp and basil, the experts said. They want to see, quickly and clearly, how it compares with other options.
“There may be a day where you want the less-healthy option, when you are treating yourself,” said Maisie Greenawalt, Bon Appetit’s vice president of strategy. “We want to give people options and let them make the choice.”
Loading...
Comments