Editor’s note: As menu labeling begins to take shape on a national level and sodium takes center stage as the next battle ground, restaurants are forced to pay attention to menu and nutrition more than ever.
In a new feature, Anita Jones-Mueller, M.P.H., president and founder of Healthy Dining, a nutrition-related marketing and consulting firm, interviews Dawn Sweeney, president and chief executive of the National Restaurant Association, on the industry and nutrition. The interview has been edited for length, and the full story can be seen at Healthy Dining’s Restaurant Nutrition News & Insights.
Anita Jones-Mueller: Never before has nutrition been in the forefront of the restaurant industry like it is now. One measure of nutrition’s importance in the industry is exemplified by the National Restaurant Association’s ‘Food and Healthy Living’ initiative. Tell us about the initiative ... why was it developed? What are the goals? How will it help the restaurant industry?
Dawn Sweeney: One of the National Restaurant Association’s core areas of interest is in food and healthy living, which includes nutrition. Serving as many people as the industry does – 130 million meals a day – we realize the important role food plays in a healthy lifestyle. This is why many restaurants offer a wide variety of nutritious menu choices to meet individual dietary needs and taste preferences. Nutrition is also an area where we’ve been seeing a growing interest among consumers, and our research indicates they are looking for healthier options when dining out.
To continue to meet industry's changing needs, as well as address public health concerns, the National Restaurant Association has created a healthy living platform that will provide a strong foundation that not only helps contribute to a healthier America but helps foster a healthy and thriving restaurant industry. Our vision is to create an environment that encourages voluntary, flexible options for restaurateurs to address today's healthy living challenges, and to create a holistic approach that encompasses a multitude of solutions.
Share with us your vision for how the restaurant industry can thrive and benefit in this nutrition-focused era.
This is an industry of innovation and innovators who continuously offer new options to satisfy an increasingly sophisticated American palate. By examining trend data, you get a feel of what is driving success in the industry. Right now, those trends clearly point to expanded nutritional offerings. They include increased produce use, more nutritious children’s options, varying portion sizes (such as bite size deserts) and more lean proteins. Restaurants that are providing these types of options and meeting their customers’ changing tastes and needs are thriving.
The Association is also playing a leading role in helping to enhance nutritional outcomes. Our valued partnership with Healthy Dining is certainly an example of this effort. Through HealthyDiningFinder.com, operators are able to connect customers with healthy offerings. We are also working with partner organizations such as the Produce Marketing Association on an aggressive goal to increase produce use in restaurants by fifty percent over ten years.
Through partnerships such as these, we will able to help restaurateurs with opportunities to serve their guests, and in the process, drive more business and customer loyalty.
What do you recommend for restaurants as strategies to contribute to public health? What is a realistic role for the industry in supporting public health?
I think the restaurant industry is, and will continue to be, part of the solution in helping Americans live healthier lives, but there must be a holistic approach beyond restaurants.
Restaurants are offering additional healthier choices and more nutrition information than ever before, but education is a critical component that needs additional attention. As more and more nutritional information becomes available in restaurants, consumers should have the education they need to make the choices that are ideal for their individual health needs and lifestyle.
With regard to children, there is very little nutrition education in schools today, and a greater emphasis is needed on physical activity. We have worked with the First Lady’s initiative, “Let’s Move,” and the Association’s contract foodservice members to reach an agreement that will help our nation’s schools to qualify for the “Healthier U.S. School Challenge” by increasing the availability of fruits and vegetables and providing schools with nutrition education. Likewise, working with the culinary community, we assisted in recruiting chefs to adopt schools as part of the “Let’s Move” program.
The NRA and many operators supported a federal menu labeling mandate as part of health care reform. Tell us how this new menu labeling mandate will be good for the industry.
Before the passage of the federal nutrition disclosure legislation earlier this year, menu labeling requirements were being decided at the state and local level. While all were designed to require nutrition information, the requirements were different from one locality to another. This was creating a growing patchwork of requirements that are confusing for both for the industry and for the consumer. In fact, without the passage of the federal law, we estimate that there could have been more than 40 to 50 separate state and local requirements within a couple of years. This simply did not make sense.
The new law for restaurants and similar retail food establishments is similar to what exists for the consumer packaged goods food industry – it creates one national standard and preempts any state and local requirement that is not identical. This way, this nutrition information will be presented in the same uniform manner no matter where a consumer dines across the country.
The Association worked in conjunction with several of its chain members for more than two years with a bipartisan group of Members of Congress, industry leaders and consumer groups to come to this historic agreement establishing the national menu labeling standard. In the end, provision had support from more than 77 health organizations.
Do you think menu labeling will spur restaurants to create and offer a larger selection of healthier cuisine?
It is certainly possible. There is some early evidence that certain consumers will use nutritional information to order fewer calories. However, as I mentioned in an earlier answer, even before the menu labeling provision was passed into law, we were seeing restaurants offer more “healthful” options. This is a trend we are expecting to see continue.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report in April advocating that the government should “expeditiously initiate a process to set mandatory national standards for the sodium content of foods.” It’s probably reasonable to assume that most restaurants do not want to be burdened with legislation mandating sodium content. What do you recommend that will enable the industry to support public health and sodium concerns, yet protect restaurants from having to drastically alter the taste and/or composition of their recipes?
In an industry that incorporates a broad array of concepts and ethnic cuisines, tastes and expectations of food choices differ across the country and among cultures, I think you can understand why we are opposed to one size fits all federal, state or local mandates around sodium content. Because of this variety, a flexible, voluntary, incremental approach is needed, and bears a greater likelihood for success. Many within the industry have been working for some time to reduce sodium in menu items – or at least to offer a number of selections that are lower in sodium. This is also an area where we have been partnering with our supply chain as restaurants cannot reduce the sodium level of products or ingredients that we purchase.
Whenever you talk about sodium, one of the things you have to keep in mind is that without customer acceptance, there will be no measurable change in consumer behavior. This is why voluntary approach must be incremental. Consumer palates can only be changed slowly over time, and that any recipe reformulations will have to be carefully phased in, or consumers may stop consuming the lower sodium options and not be willing to try lower sodium options in the future, or add salt to their meal at the table.
About Anita Jones-Mueller, M.P.H.
Anita founded Healthy Dining with a vision and dedication to contribute to a healthier America by “bringing together the culinary brilliance of the restaurant industry with America’s growing quest for great-tasting, healthier cuisine.” She is a nationally recognized authority bringing to market innovative nutrition-related strategies and solutions to enable the restaurant industry to prosper while helping to educate and empower Americans to enjoy healthier cuisine. Anita earned a Master’s Degree in Public Health from San Diego State University.
