Say a local soup and sandwich shop wanted to have their wares analyzed, to post for their dieting patrons, would it be a financial burden?
There are a lot of software packages, both professional and for home use, that will calculate the nutritional value of a serving of a recipe. (MasterCook is a popular home program.) This is NOT as accurate as actually testing the food, though, and it may not pass muster if the restaurant is in an area where nutritional info posting is mandated by law.
A number of states and localities have proposed mandatory calorie content statements. There has been a huge, if mostly undefined, uproar about the costs of such a requirement, especially coming now in the midst of a recession. That’s why no bill that’s passed that I’m aware of requires small businesses to comply. The New York City law has a minimum of 15 stores. The Massachusetts law 20. However, I haven’t been able to find out exactly what these costs are.
The closest comes in an article about a Denver chain, although it only did 30 items, not its full menu.
Those costs can add up for a chain, although the speaker quoted in this article on the Massachusetts bill has an ax to grind.
$80 per dish? Not bad at all… Really makes you wonder what those franchise owners are bitching about. (I know, patrons ordering smaller portions!)
Of course, it’s not a real nutritional analysis. Knowing calories, fat, etc., may be important, but it won’t tell you the true nutritional contents in terms of vitamins and minerals. That always upsets me. Leads to a lot of ignorance re nutrition.
To continue from Exapno’s article:
Anyone know what that’s about?
If you are familiar with the calories of breads, grains, veggies and meats you can usually estimate the caloric content of a meal with a fair degree of accuracy. I’m usually off by no more than 5-10% if I check my claoric estimates of fast-food meals and subs & sandwiches against their published website data. The problems in being accurate arise if the food has lot of oil heavy sauces like Chinese or if there is poor portion or condiment control by the prep staff. Some fast food burgers have so much mayo the website data is useless.
IN general restaurant prepared food has a lot more calories than you might think.
Bully for you.
How does this response help the OP at all?
Any business would rather go out and comply with one set of federal regulations (no matter how stupid) than 50 sets of differing state regulations, no two of which are strictly comparable.
I think the OP question leads to a lot of other questions.
On the surface it should be very easy to find out the calories. Let’s take a cheese sandwich. You look up the calories for a slice of bread, multiply by two. Look up the calories for a slice of cheese and then add them together.
Same for, say, a pound cake, Look up the calories in a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour and a pound of eggs and add them together. Bake the cake, cut it into eight pieces then divide the total calories of the cake by 8
Now this is a bit simplistic. Many people cook by feel, they’re not measuring anything exactly. This may result in +/- 10 calories. Not much but if the resturant posts one thing and it’s actually 10+ more calories, is this a legal offense?
Another thing to consider is the amount of calories, suppose my cheese sandwich comes to 310 calories. Now anyone knows in marketing 295 is a LOT less than 310. Not really but you get the idea $1.99 is less than $2.00. So what do I do. I simply knock off part of the cheese but being the greedy capitalist I don’t charge less. See customer abuse, the customer is paying the same price for a 295 calorie sandwich that previously had more cheese (and of course more calories - 310)
You may laugh at the above example but that is why the penny sticks around, people insist the retailers will alway round UP and that few pennies will cost over the course of a year or whatever.
Until you have a cheap way of measuring and testing things so they are correct, it would be hard to do. On one hand you don’t want to fine a resturant, because the chef sees the butter expires today so he uses a bit extra in each dish to use it all up, but don’t want to let the resturant with being able to use the law to con the customer.
For instance you might allow a range of calories but not too much because the resturant would alway cite the low part.
I don’t buy the argument that if you list calories, fat and salt people won’t buy. That ain’t true. McDonalds and Burger King have their calories CLEARLY marked up where you order (at least the ones in Chicago do) and they have pamphlets with that info you can take home with you. And it doesn’t stop people from ordering.
How in the world do you know what happens with the millions of orders in fast food restaurants in a market as large as Chicago? Do urban and suburban sites have the same patterns? Mall sites vs. highway sites? How do you know if people cut down their orders from their usuals? Or switch to different foods? Or come in less often? Or not at all? How many people and how many orders does it take to make a difference in their bottom line? What it it’s 2%? Do you mean to tell us you can by casual inspection tell if people are ordering 2% fewer total dollars of food?
I don’t believe a word of it. I wouldn’t believe a word if you could give us the year to year comparison total of a entire single franchise. That wouldn’t be representative either.
Comments about the totality of peoples’ behavior are impossible to make accurately by watching a few scattered examples. And nobody has the opportunity to do the 24/7 watching that might be half meaningful. Half, because that would not take it all the other variables that accrue from the recession, unemployment, businesses in the area shutting down, declining population, changes in menu items, or the million other things that go into a true comparison.
This claim is nonsense. Pure and simple. Any relation to the truth would be sheerly coincidental.
By pointing out that in the absence of nutritional data for a specific dish the only real world way you are going to get a useful handle on meal calories while dining is to figure them out for yourself by breaking out the components of the meal and using calorie guide info to estimate calories for each section. I apologize, I didn’t mean for this to be such an infuriating brain teaser for you.
What would be? The corporation knows what’s selling and what isn’t and how many customers they had. Assuming they’d publish that data (unlikely) and allow it to be verified, surely that would at least give us percentages to work with.
Rather than just declare the claim “nonsense”, and even though it’s the claimant’s responsibility to prove it, not ours to disprove it, I have an observation. McDonald’s wouldn’t continue providing the healthier food if it wasn’t selling or profitable. They’re getting new customers, or current customers have switched foods, or both. OTOH, some of the “healthier” food isn’t that much healthier. In addition, their published nutrition info may be inaccurate or misleading.