The latest episode of our podcast features Sonia Couto, the Founder of MenuSano as she talks about how the restaurant industry has been affected by COVID-19, how foodservice businesses can be supported during this time, and how the Nutrition Analysis software, MenuSano can assist foodservice businesses during this time.
This is part two of two.
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The Healthy Menu Podcast – Episode 14: COVID-19, Restaurants and Foodservice, Part Two
Light Transcript of Interview
K:Â Are there ways where you can highlight the allergens that are within your product? How do we get around that and are we compliant with the FDA?
S:Â We have various ways; we have all the allergen tracking in our system so users – once they’ve created the recipes they are taken to a screen that has all the different allergens available and they will select the allergens that belong to that recipe and it’ll add it to the label.
Are we FDA compliant? We only use government sourced data and we only provide compliant labels in Canada and the US. In the US particularly, we only use the FDA data that the government provides and all of our labels are used and are compliant with FDA.
We also worked with the Canadian Public Health on a pilot project for a year before we actually launched to make sure that nutritionists for public health were testing our system and making sure that we were compliant with all of the policies that were coming out.
K:Â Why don’t you talk to us about the new Recipe Costing feature?
S:Â One of the things that I’m very proud of is that we are always listening to our clients. This product was built as a passion project, it wasn’t something that we set out to do and make a business out of this. It was a passion and we wanted to serve that industry. As a result of that, we built this wonderful tool but we also realize that there are other needs out there for our clients. So we work very closely with our clients, particularly our beta clients who were the first people that took this on and used it and gave us feedback.
We asked them, what else do you want or what would you like to see this system do for you? How much more value can we bring to you?
One of the big requests that we had was recipe costing. We’re already using the system to build recipes to get the nutrition, so we said, okay. Well, let’s introduce recipe costing. So now with this brand-new feature, when the user creates the recipe, not only do they get the nutrition labels for that recipe, but they are now able to see the cost of actually making that recipe.
They see the overall cost of the recipe which includes all of the ingredients but they also get to see each ingredient individually.
