Just Eat has teamed up with Gregg Wallace to support its restaurant partners to offer healthier options, as takeaways become increasingly part of everyday life.
Alongside registered nutritionist Charlotte Radcliffe, Wallace visited ten restaurants in Birmingham as part of a three-month pilot project, where they brainstormed new ideas with each owner on how they could expand their offerings.
From adding healthier items to menus to more effectively marketing the healthiest dishes to customers, the sessions covered a range of topics. As part of the project, each restaurant will now trial tailored changes to their menus to help them meet increasing demand for healthier choices.
The participating restaurants, which represent a variety of different cuisine types, have also benefited from a free trial of Nutritics, an innovative tool to calculate the nutritional value of menu items, for the duration of the pilot.
At the end of the project, Just Eat will analyse restaurant and customer feedback and develop a broader programme of support for its entire restaurant partner base across the UK. This will offer all of Just Eat’s 58,000 restaurant partners the tools, advice and incentivisation to make beneficial changes.
Wallace said, “As someone who has recently transformed my own diet, I know that takeaways can be enjoyed as part of a healthy lifestyle - but it’s not always easy to find those options. Customers need to be able to find a healthy option every time they order in.
'Most restaurants we visited were already actively taking steps, whether that is adding new healthier dishes or exploring where they can swap ingredients, but there’s always more that can be done.”
Andrew Kenny, UK Managing Director at Just Eat, added, “Consumers are increasingly looking to enjoy takeaways as part of a healthy balanced diet - but research we carried out earlier this year showed that less than a third think they can do so currently.
'As a platform that offers more than 100 different cuisine types, we are using our reach to help our restaurant partners to tap into and further drive this demand. This programme is just the first step for us as we look to create sustainable change across the industry.”
Radcliffe said, “With consumers and governments both increasingly focused on the importance of a healthy balanced diet, we are working with Just Eat to give the takeaway sector the knowledge and tools to get ahead of this trend.
'By working closely with restaurants to understand how they operate and what their customers want, we can help them make simple menu changes, enabling the healthy choice to be the easier choice.”
Shajan Ahmed, chef at Shazan'z Kebab House, said, “More and more of our customers are looking for something healthy, and we’re seeing sales increasingly driven by the popularity of our grilled meat and fish options with healthy sides.
'We’re really pleased to be part of this project as we look to add even more nutritious and balanced options to our menu to cater to this demand.”