Recently, we’ve been realigning our areas of focus at the National Restaurant Association to more effectively foster prosperity, prominence and participation for America’s restaurants and those we serve. Leading the industry in a proactive way is critical, especially with so many game-changing issues at hand.

One core area of interest is food and healthy living. Serving as many people as we do — 130 million meals a day — America’s restaurants are highly sensitive to consumers’ interest in and demand for healthful options.

But simply offering more healthful menu items is not enough. Food must taste good, too. In one survey, 75 percent of restaurant customers said they wanted more healthful items
on the menu, but only 51 percent said they actually order those items, and in practice, it may be less. More than 77 percent of those surveyed said taste was the No. 1 factor in determining their choices. Restaurants have a challenge in meeting all these consumer preferences at once.

At the NRA, we’ve made it our priority to be the industry’s best ally on these issues. The vision, developed with broad industry participation as part of the Food & Healthy Living industry imperative, is to secure an environment that encourages voluntary, flexible options for restaurateurs to address today’s healthy-living challenges.

Our goals include:

• Positioning the industry as a leader in the area of health and well-being.
• Defending against costly regulations.
• Establishing an open dialogue on nutrition issues facing the industry.
• Partnering with key stakeholders to devise programs that work.
• Providing a flexible set of options and tools to assist our members in adapting to customer preferences.

Among the many steps we’re taking is the creation of a Web-based portal on www.restaurant.org that features healthy-living resources. We also co-led the Coalition for Responsible Nutrition Information that helped enact a federal nutrition disclosure standard that pre-empts a confusing and costly patchwork of local regulations.

Our focus on food and healthy living is beginning to show results. America’s restaurants are leading the way by offering lower-calorie and smaller-portion options, improved nutrition in school lunches, increased produce offerings, and more information to enable consumers to make the dietary choices that are right for them.

We want to hear from you. E-mail me at Dawn.Sweeney@restaurant.org and let me know what your company is doing in this important effort. Let’s get the word out about what’s on the menu at America’s restaurants.

Dawn Sweeney is president and chief executive of the National Restaurant Association and the NRA Educational Foundation.

Nation’s Restaurant News has an agreement with the National Restaurant Association to present the group’s positions on the National Restaurant Association Insights page. For more information from the National Restaurant Association, check out the print edition of Nation’s Restaurant News.