Many people are looking for healthier alternatives to match their lifestyles and resolutions at the start of the year. While these requests may pose a problem for some restaurants, it’s an opportunity for your business to make changes and immediately appeal to a larger demographic.
In the new year, support your customers in achieving their health goals by offering delicious and healthy meal plans, better menu choices, and more nutritious and sustainable ingredients.
Consider these suggestions when creating healthier options at your restaurant.
- Use Symbols to Indicate Healthy Menu Options
Restaurants can offer healthier alternatives without many tweaks to their current menus.
Look into adding a legend to create a healthy restaurant menu without making it longer or needing to reprint it all the time. Place specific symbols for dishes that can be prepared more healthily. After checking with your kitchen team, here is a sample menu key to consider:
- Grill: A grill symbol shows that chicken, sandwiches, and other foods can be grilled rather than sauteed, deep fried, or cooked in butter.
- Leaf: A leaf indicates that pasta dishes, sandwiches, wraps, salads, and other foods are vegetarian.
- V: A “V” symbol indicates that vegetarian dishes can be made vegan.
- Grain: A grain logo denotes that sandwiches, wraps, and other products can be made with whole grains instead of white flour.
- Vegetable: A vegetable suggests certain meals can be made with certified organic produce.
- Sugar-Free: A sugar-free symbol demonstrates that desserts or drinks can be made without processed sugars.
- Offer Lunch-Sized Portions
Even when people eat healthier, they will want to enjoy an occasional night dining out with family and friends.
To help customers order some of their favorite foods without splurging on extra calories, offer menu items in smaller, lunch-size portions at lower prices.
Additionally, offering smaller portions not only benefits your customers but also helps your restaurant reduce its overall amount of food waste.
- Show Calorie Counts
A popular way to lose weight and eat healthier is by counting calories. Many diet applications require users to log their specific caloric intake.
Showing these numbers on your menu will help customers more smoothly record their data. This readily available information will make visiting your restaurant easier for your customers.
- Consider Packaging Healthy Meals
If your kitchen has extra space or any capacity, creating a healthy meal plan – even for a few meals a day might bring in extra income for the restaurant and interest from additional customers.
As always, be sure to use the right ingredients, and again consider including all available calories, macros, and other details that diners might want to know.
- Make Healthy Ingredient Substitutions
Using healthier ingredient substitutions can sometimes add extra costs, and these ingredients may alter how you want your appetizers, entrees, or desserts to taste.
Think about making fundamental changes that will add little to your spending costs or drastically alter the look and flavor of your food.
These tips may help you create a healthier restaurant menu.
- Integrate higher-quality oils – like coconut, olive, and peanut oil – with your fryer when preparing certain appetizers.
- Avoid oils with higher levels of polyunsaturated fats, including soybean, canola, and sunflower oil.
- Use natural juices when making cocktails.
- Try freshly-squeezed fruit juices and other natural extracts in sauces, baked goods, and entrees.
- Drizzle olive oil over your vegetables instead of using butter.
- Use brown rice instead of white rice.
- Offer olive oil and vinegar instead of creamy, fatty dressings.
- Cook with low-sodium soy sauce.
- Use Greek yogurt instead of sour cream.
One thing to note when researching healthy substitutes is that foods labeled fat-free or sugar-free are only sometimes beneficial. Many food manufacturers will replace fat or sugar in their products with high fructose corn syrup or other chemicals, which can end up making them less healthy than they were initially.
Always read the ingredients on the back before using them in your recipes.
- Offer Leaner Cuts
It is possible to offer guests a less fattening protein option. By cooking with leaner cuts of meat, your kitchen can often cut out half the fat and calories.
When planning out meat entrees and other protein-based specials, look into the following suggestions:
- Offer steaks with sirloin or round as these cuts tend to have lower fat content than rib-eyes.
- Use a leaner percentage of ground beef.
- Remove the skin from chicken and fish when possible.
- Try serving light meat instead of dark meat.
- Cook lean cuts of meat in a healthier way: broil or grill your meat, fish, or poultry rather than sauteing or deep frying.
- Omit unnecessary fats like butter and cream in food preparation.
- Add red meat burger alternatives to your menu, like turkey, chicken, bean, and vegetable burgers.
Overall, offering customers healthier options and advertising you use beneficial cooking methods can appeal to health-conscious customers, help to bring in new customers, and boost your profits.
By implementing some of the above ideas, you’ll be able to adapt your menu to be more inclusive for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
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