Calorie counts on menus ‘will cost food industry €110m per year’
The body made the claim as the Food Safety Authority launched MenuCal — an online calculator available free of charge to Ireland’s 22,000 food service businesses so that they can calculate the calorie values in the food they serve to customers.
While it is not obligatory yet for restaurants to place the calorie count on menus, RAI chief executive Adrian Cummins said any proposed legislation requiring this will cost each restaurant about €5,000 per year.
He said: “How does the Department of Health suggest that we pay for this without having to pass on that cost to employees, reduce their hours or cut staff? It’s not easy for a business to cough up €5,000 in the morning. The banks aren’t lending us any money.”
Mr Cummins said the new MenuCal will require chefs to manually input data for each dish and that this will take each chef five hours per week on average — 20 hours per month — to complete a 40-item monthly menu.
He said the proposals were “total nonsense” and that a study by New York University on calorie counts on menus in the US found that five out of six customers paid no attention to the information.
“How does the Government propose that this will be monitored? Will civil servants/health officers be paid to eat out in all of Ireland’s 22,000 food outlets and check if each menu has calorie counts on them? Any chef will tell you that menus in restaurants vary from day-to-day and therefore calorie counting would be highly inaccurate anyway. It’s difficult to calculate hand-crafted dishes correctly,” he said.
However, chief specialist of public health nutrition at the FSAI, Dr Mary Flynn, said MenuCal was tested by chefs and cooks throughout its design and development and would save businesses money in the long term.
“Our research shows that there is an overwhelming demand and desire by consumers for displaying calories on menus and that nine out of 10 consumers want calorie information displayed beside the price of food and drink items on the menu,” she said.
“We knew that a concern for food businesses was to be able to provide this information accurately and to be able to do it themselves.”
Dr Flynn said MenuCal offers chefs and cooks an extremely efficient way of securely storing all their recipes and ingredients in one location.
