By Lawrence Madsen, Executive Chef
A new law requiring hotels, restaurants and other eating establishments to display nutrition information will go into effect in the United States next year. This law requires chains with 20 or more locations to display calories on menus, and to make more detailed nutrition information such as saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol available in writing. The 20 location rule appears to be applied at the chain (or brand) level, so the law will impact any hotel management company (regardless of the number of properties under management) if the brand itself has more than 20 properties.
Producing nutritional information on a fixed menu is difficult enough, but the task is especially challenging in establishments where the Chef is continuously creating new recipes such as full service hotels and gourmet restaurants. Whether you have fixed menus or they are continuously changing, the BirchStreet Recipe Management Application can help you meet the new requirements.
The BirchStreet Recipe Management Application includes an ingredient library with thousands of ingredients, each with full nutritional facts, allergen and yield information. The application will instantly produce a USDA nutrition fact label for any recipe created in the system. Printouts with more detailed nutritional information such as saturated fat, sodium, cholesterol, allergens and intolerances for your recipes are just a click away. Furthermore, finding dishes free of gluten, eggs, nuts and other common allergens for guests with special dietary restriction is easy with the system’s search features.
BirchStreet is continuously adding new ingredients to the library on behalf of our customers along with the accompanying nutrition and allergen data. Customers can also add their own ingredients to the library, including associated nutritional facts.
Recipes and ingredients can also be linked to supplier catalogs (from our e-Procurement system) to compute and continuously update recipe cost.
More Information about the BirchStreet Recipe Management Application:
