Starting and running a food business

It makes good business sense to give your customers healthier food choices. By serving healthier options you could help improve the health of your customers while also reducing your operating costs. For example, you could reduce the amount of meat in a pasta dish by substituting it with finely diced vegetables. 

Making menus healthier

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) in Northern Ireland has a range of online resources to help you make your menu healthier.

Their Calorie Wise scheme supports you to display energy information – in both kilojoules (kJ) and kilocalories (kcal) – on your menu and provide healthier options, enabling consumers to make healthier, more informed choices when eating out.

To put energy information on your menu will need to accurately calculate the energy content of your recipes. You can do this using the FSA's free online MenuCal tool. The tool can also help you identify, manage and communicate required allergen information. 

By standardising recipes and planning your menu, you can make small changes to make the food you serve healthier and more profitable.

Healthier catering tips for food businesses

A range of healthier catering guides is available from the FSA. These guides provide simple, practical changes that businesses can make when procuring, preparing, cooking, serving and promoting food. There are seven different business-specific guides:

• Healthier catering tips for food businesses
• Healthier catering tips for Chinese restaurants and takeaways
• Healthier catering tips for chip shops
• Healthier catering tips for Indian and South Asian restaurants and takeaways
• Healthy catering tips for Italian restaurants and takeaways
• Healthier catering tips for pizza restaurants and takeaways
• Healthier catering tips for sandwich shops

These guides describe simple, practical changes businesses can make when procuring, preparing, cooking, serving and promoting food.

Making Food Better programme

The FSA's Making Food Better programme, previously known as the Eating Well Choosing Better programme, supports Northern Ireland food businesses to make the food environment healthier through:

• reducing calories, saturated fat, sugar, and salt in the food they produce, sell or serve
• reducing portion size
• providing nutritional information
• delivering responsible promotions  

The acronym below outlines the meaning of "Better" and what the FSA aims to achieve under the Making Food Better programme: 

• Balanced – providing nutritionally balanced options.
• Environment – promoting a healthier and more sustainable food environment.
• Transparent – providing consumers with more information about the food they eat.
• Trusted – high quality food, that is what it says it is.
• Education – educating consumers about a healthy balanced diet and providing data and insights about food product improvement.
• Reformulation – food product improvement to make food that is healthier.

The FSA works with a range of stakeholders across Northern Ireland including local councils and academic institutions to support the food industry in making food better.

The FSA website lists a range of resources, funding and support available to food businesses in Northern Ireland to help them produce healthier food.