Keep guests safe and ensure compliance with accurate, up-to-date nutrition and allergen information
Did you know? Roughly 15 million Americans (including 5.9 million children) are managing food allergies. Each year, 200,000 people in the U.S. need emergency medical attention from contact with a food allergen. Yikes! Meanwhile, sensitivities and intolerances to specific ingredients are on the rise.
To guarantee your guests’ safety, you need to have accurate information available.This info must also be easy to find, both for guests and staff. When your menu changes, are you still able to ensure accuracy? What if Chef makes a last-minute change or substitution? When a guest asks a question about an ingredient, do you know for sure you’re giving the right answer?
In this guide, we share tips for making sure up-to-date allergen information is accessible to guests and employees. We’ll share how accurate ingredient information can also improve your guest experience. Finally, we show how better data and insights can help your restaurant achieve more.
Food allergies and intolerances are increasingly driving customer decisions about where to spend their money. As the prevalence of food intolerances and allergies has grown, so too has the effort required by restaurateurs/food operators to maintain customer dining choice, while protecting their guests from accidental exposure to allergens.
While the FDA requires food manufacturers to include accurate allergen information on labels and packaging, legislation varies state to state for how restaurants communicate this information to guests. Ensuring accurate information is a matter of guest safety, and many systems require a manual process for updating recipes. This can be a time-consuming — and often inaccurate — process.
Today, a solution with integrated recipe systems can automatically update all recipe allergen values when the relevant ingredients change. This means consumer-facing information reflects live updates to allergens, available to the front-of-house teams or through various digital channels, such as websites, apps or digital signage.
An estimated 15 million Americans suffer from food allergies, and many more from food intolerance. An allergic reaction can be produced by even a trace amount of an ingredient. Symptoms range from mild itching to anaphylaxis (shock). Around 200,000 people experience emergency hospitalizations as a result of a food-related allergy.
There is no cure for food allergy. The only way to manage it is to avoid food that causes the reaction. Food service businesses need to help customers make informed decisions about the dishes they order. Failure to do so risks making customers ill — or worse, not to mention court proceedings, prosecution, fines and reputational damage.
Fourth’s recipe & menu engineering solution has given us the tools to increase margin. It saves far more than it costs and we could not run our business efficiently without it. I can’t imagine being without it, and I would absolutely recommend it to any hospitality business needing accurate, reliable recipe creation and costs.
Christine Parker,
Catering Compliance Manager, SA Brain and Company Ltd.
Fourth Expert Top Tip
More customers are demanding greater information about the food and drink that they consume. Being able to change your offering frequently maintains your competitive edge, but the first of these often hampers the second. Maintaining all this information in readily accessible and automated systems can help to control this important aspect of your business.
Adrian Chalmers,
Director of Project Delivery, Fourth
Fourth Expert Top Tip
Recipes should be precise, capture hidden costs, highlight allergens and production information for the benefit of both the kitchen as well as front-of-house. This promotes knowledge transfer and the upsell of the right content — facilitating menu profitability and informed decision making.
Nimirta Lulla,
Senior Solutions Architect, Fourth
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