Nutrition analysis software for restaurants is certainly the way to get ahead and compete effectively in today’s information-hungry and health-conscious market. Providing nutrition information on your menu items gives customers choices and consequently improves their customer satisfaction.
Benefit from Nutritional Values
If you’ve decided to research nutrition analysis software for restaurants, then there are many features that may or may not be included in the package you choose from different providers.
Here are some key features to look out for:
Secure backup & recovery and confidential account information
As a restaurant, recipes are important and valuable information. They are literally your trade secrets, so you need to ensure you choose a package that views security as a top priority. Always ensure that the website is using an SSL certificate, which encrypts data entered into the system so that it cannot be monitored or hijacked.
Read more: How to Create a Nutrition Fact Label from a Recipe
Recipe experimentation
Nutrition analysis software is a great way to experiment with recipes. When you first start using the software and input some dishes, you may be surprised to find out how much fat, sugar, or sodium is in them. You may want to reduce the amounts and give some recipes a “health overhaul.”
Nutrition analysis software is also a great help when you are trying out or creating a new dish. When your team prepares the dish, everyone will be able to taste-test the dish, see the nutritional data, and adjust it. You will be able to create incredibly tasty dishes that your customers will love and that have attractive nutrition profiles, too! Make sure that the software you choose allows you to edit recipes and view similar recipes that you have categorized side by side to help with this process.
Read more: Adding Nutrition Adds Value For Customers
Combine Recipes into dishes
An important feature to consider in a package is the ability to save a recipe as prep or as a basic. For example, you can save a signature Alfredo sauce or Pizza tomato sauce that you use as a constituent part of many dishes. This time-saving feature of nutrition analysis software combines the nutrition values for each recipe and calculates the nutrition of the dish. You’re looking for software that will provide a nutrition facts label for the dish and enable you to get the nutrition analysis for one serving.
Read more: The Chef’s Guide to Nutrition: Meeting Customer Demands in Restaurant
Recipe Management
Just like in a cookbook, you want to be able to find your recipes and locate them with ease. Look for this feature so that you can easily create dishes using prep items such as house dressing, and you can organize all the recipes into easy-to-find sections such as appetizers, desserts, and entrees.
Food Costing Software
The costing feature is an added value to look out for. How much you spend on ingredients in your dishes is a huge part of how you run a profitable business. Without nutrition analysis software for restaurants, you may spend a lot of time literally with a pen and paper or Excel sheets inputting data to calculate the cost of each dish or the cost of each dish you would like to put on your menu.
Because you are inputting the ingredient and the amount of each ingredient into the nutrition calculator it’s very easy to calculate the cost of each prepared dish simply by inputting the cost you paid per kilo for that ingredient. So when you export the data not only will you have a nutritional profile but you will also have an exact costing per portion.
Read more: Why Do You Need to Display Nutrition Information on Food Labels?
Export Labels with Ease
Another feature to check out is the ability to export nutrition data and labels. You’ll need to be able to export your nutritional information, which can either be downloaded to print, placed on packaging, or added to your menu.
USDA, the Canadian Nutrient File and Public Health England’s Nutritional Databases
It’s important to choose a package that has an extensive database of ingredients. It’s always possible that you have an ingredient that isn’t in the database so the ability to add a custom ingredient is another feature to look out for.
Allergen Statements
A large number of Canadians suffer from either food allergies or intolerances, and therefore, they absolutely can not have certain ingredients in their diet. Some of the ingredients that are problematic for sufferers of food allergies are eggs, fish, milk, peanuts, shellfish, soy, tree nuts, and wheat. Highlighting allergens is a feature you may want to include in your nutrition analysis software package.
Read more: Nutrition Analysis for Cannabis Edibles
Easy to Use
It’s important that the nutrition analysis software you choose is easy to use. It’s likely that you will want to be able to give your restaurant manager, chefs and bookkeeper access to your nutrition analysis software. Check that it’s easy to add quantities and view the data. Many packages will let you take advantage of free trials.
Pricing
If you take the time to shop around, you’ll find packages that are for a limited number of recipes which may be suitable for you. Alternatively, you may need a package that allows you to create and store an unlimited number. Some packages you can pay for on a month to month pay-as-you-go basis or you can get a better deal by paying for the software annually.
Some companies may ask for an upfront payment of up to $2500 for you to use the software annually on an unlimited basis. You can also pay for companies to produce data and labels for a limited number of recipes for you. In terms, of monthly pricing, it can range from as little as $25 to upwards of $249.
Read more: Labeling Rules & Ingredient Supply Chain Issues
MenuSano as a Nutrition Calculator for Restaurants
MenuSano is a great choice of nutrition analysis software and boasts numerous features.
First and foremost, MenuSano has been designed by an expert development team. Security is their top priority, and recipes will remain in your account only.
The database that MenuSano uses contains a huge 80,000 ingredients. It’s unlikely that you’ll search for an item in the Menusano database, and it’s not there. However, perhaps you are adding some new ingredients to your menu and are incorporating some must-have ingredients for 2019, such as insect powder. In which case, don’t worry, it’s easy to add custom items!
With Menusano you’ll also find that the time-saving feature of being able to combine recipes into dishes is included which is a big plus. Exporting data and labels with MenuSano is seamless. You can export the data to your menus or produce labels as JPEGs. You can also create labels that highlight health claims.
Allergen labelling is another great feature included as a standard in the MenuSano package. By including this kind of information, you are enabling customers that have allergies and their friends and families to safely and happily dine in your restaurant.
MenuSano is designed to be easy to use for everyone in your team. With MenuSano, you’ll be up and running in no time. And with a little practice, you’ll be a wiz with all the features too.
With MenuSano you can get all these features at an amazingly affordable price. Unlimited recipe creation and storage from Menusano is just $42 per month. It’s the most affordable on the market, and it has all these features and more. You can also use this package for multiple locations! If you’d like to try out MenuSano, then simply click the link and start a free trial.
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