Should You Include Dietary Information on Your Menu?
There is a growing trend for restaurants and fast food outlets to provide nutritional information on their menus, with many of the country’s biggest names in fast food already offering this to their customers.
It is not as easy for a small restaurant to provide such information as it is a labour- and cost intensive process to assess each meal and its nutritional and calorific content as they do not have the same infrastructure and resources, so it is no surprise to note that very few privately-owned restaurants do this.
Current Rules & Regulations
As yet, there is not an official ruling that states that restaurants need to provide nutritional and calorific information on their menus, although as the awareness healthy eating increases, this is likely to change.The current situation is that the Food Standards Authority (the FSA) is working to make consistent dietary information on all menus standard regulation, with all areas that show menus, such as the board in fast food restaurants as well as ‘hand-held’ menus showing the information. While there has not been an announcement on this, and indeed there are talks that the FSA will be scaled back in accordance with the Government’s cuts, it is clear that this is the way the industry is going.
The FSA’s research highlights that 85 % of British consumers want to see further information on menus in order to make more informed choices in what they chose to buy. The British Government is also keen to promote healthy eating and consumer responsibility in making better food choices by including more information, particularly as the UK is seeing an increasing obesity epidemic.