From offering more baked foods, to color-coding the utensils at the salad bar to indicate the healthiness of each ingredient, Sinclair’s food services are becoming healthier.
“If you’re into the health aspects of your food, you’ll notice a lot more than if you’re not,” says Tim Sweet, the general manager of food services at Sinclair.
“Students are getting smarter about what they eat, more aware of what they’re putting into their bodies,” says Sweet. “Eating habits 10 years ago were a lot different than they are today.”
A big part of choosing to eat healthier is having access to foods’ nutritional information. Health-conscious students can find that information through a number of outlets, including recipe books and signs in the marketplace and at www.aramarkcafe/sinclair.
For smarter on-the-spot decisions, the marketplace’s ‘just for you’ icon system emphasizes healthy aspects of certain foods, such as fat-free, calcium-rich and low-calorie options.
The number of healthy food options is also expanding. Aramark has a partnership with Cooking Light, a national magazine that highlights healthy recipes, and has been including some of those recipes in their regular cycle menus.
Smaller portions of foods are also being offered, such as half sandwiches, yogurt parfaits, and snack cups with cheese and crackers or carrots and celery.
In response to requests for more gluten-free foods (according to Sweet, one in 200 people in the US can’t eat gluten products), Aramark will soon be testing gluten-free pizzas with dough made from rice flour.
Sweet says that people are eating less red meat and instead choosing chicken. For non-meat-eaters, tofu is available on request as a replacement at some stations, and tofu burgers were first offered this fall.
“When I first got here, we only had beef hamburgers,” said Sweet. “Now we have garden burgers, boca burgers, black bean burgers, tofu burgers and turkey burgers. It’s just changing with the times. There’s all kinds of options, even in the burger world.”
Not all of Aramark’s health initiatives involve simply offering more options. They have also instituted some ‘stealth health’ changes, such as using only low-fat mayonnaise, zero trans-fat frying oil and low-sodium bases in soups.
Even in the vending machines, the company makes an effort to include healthy products. Some vending machines contain only healthy foods, and some have certain rows designated for healthy foods (look for the checkmark symbol).
Healthy options are here to stay. “I hope everyone’s going toward that trend,” says Sweet.