What is Food Choice?
Food Choice is the ability to choose between different meals and food items, when you want to eat and where. At Church Resources, we understand that for our members in the aged care sector, when it comes to their residents, food choice presents an opportunity to promote food intake at a time of convenience and selecting an appetising meal. There are a lot of unconscious thoughts we make in selecting the food we consume. Food choice is built up over a lifetime based our experiences and unique taste preferences.
How Much Food Choice is Provided in the Aged Care Sector?
Procurement Australasia Foodservice Ambassador, Dr Karen Abbey published a paper in 2015 on the level of choice in aged care homes, which showed only 36% provided two choices for a hot lunch meal, 11% provided two choices of lunch dessert and 39% for two evening meal options. Click here to read this journal article.
Providing choice is not easy. In order to provide a wide range of choices your foodservices, your kitchen must be able to produce to demand. That is why menu planning is important to ensure a wide variety of foods and avoid menu repetition. It is also important to make sure menu choice for residents is as close as possible to the mealtime.
There are simple strategies to increase food choice that won’t break the budget and can be done regardless of how your foodservices runs.
What you will learn:
- What is choice and why it is important to your consumers
- How to develop choice strategies across your menu that won’t break the budget
- Using technology to support choice
- Industry examples of how choice is being delivering through the menu
Blog written by Dr Karen Abbey – Procurement Australasia Foodservice Ambassador
Join our FREE Aged Care Webinar – “Choice- Implementing Menu and Meal Strategies in the Aged Care sector”
When: September 3 (2.00 pm – 3.30 pm)
Procurement Australasia’s Foodservice Ambassador, Dr Karen Abbey will be hosting a FREE webinar specifically catered to the issues faced by the Aged-Care industry.
