I read an interesting story this weekend about strategies restaurants are using to reduce the cost of food on the menu. There’s a whole business built around helping restaurants save money on food, as you might imagine. Here are the two basic methods they use: 1) Encouraging consumers to buy higher margin items (like pasta) and 2) Serving smaller portions (but making it look like it’s the same amount of food).
When reading this article, my first thought was – how can I apply these strategies to my own habits to help me eat healthier? Most of the ideas mentioned in the article are things we’ve all read or heard of when it comes to eating better. For example, reducing the portion of meat and loading up on vegetables or using smaller plates for meals that we expect to cover the plate (e.g., chicken marsala).
Other strategies that restaurant consultants recommend are a little bit more far-fetched, but just might work for those of us trying to eat a little bit less and a little bit more healthy. First, restaurant consultants recommend separating the description of the food from the price, so consumers are enticed by the description before they see the price. For eating healthier, why not do just the opposite? By keeping the Nutrition Facts label close by when we’re eating, we’re more likely to recognize how many servings we’re eating and at how many calories.
Another tactic employed by restaurants is to put the higher margin items in the top-right corner of the menu, which is where consumers typically look first. In terms of eating healthier, we might want to think about looking at the places we look first for snacks and then sneaking in only healthy options. In my pantry, the eye-level snacks are things like crackers and cookies. I might think about putting the air-popped popcorn and teas at eye-level instead.
Lastly, restaurants are weighing the portions – particularly where it comes to meat – in order to save money. We can easily apply this to eating healthier. Many of us know that a cup of cereal is usually equal to one portion, but do we actually know what a cup looks like? One way to save calories is to measure our food for a few days to remind ourselves what a portion size actually is. I think we’ll all be surprised at the results.
So while restaurants are actually trying to save money, maybe they’re doing us all a favor by giving us some new healthy tricks. And if you have any other calorie-saving tricks, please share them here!
Kerry
