Hospitals incentivize healthy meals for staff

Mercy Springfield Hospital has seen a change in how employees are eating since altering its menu to offer healthier, tastier and more gourmet options about six months ago.

Through a larger strategy to promote healthy choices for its employees, Mercy began offering healthier entrees and sides in its main cafeteria and cafes in November 2012.

“We want to facilitate and sustain wise choices among our co-workers,” said Mercy Hospital Springfield President Dr. Rob Steele. “It’s a difficult challenge, but we accept it.”

Contracts with both Sysco and Rhinehart FoodService – and with commitments to a couple local producers – Mercy has $6 million budgeted for the meals it serves in its main cafeteria, cafes and three day care centers, said Tyler Gant, Mercy Hospital Springfield’s chef and manager of food and nutrition services.

Mercy serves 12,500 meals each day, mostly to employees, Gant said.

While the healthier menus require a 5 percent larger budget, Gant said, the health care provider also changed its employee discounts and costs of unhealthier items in the cafeteria and cafes to offset those costs.

Prior to the menu change, employees were given a 20 percent discount for all items in the cafeteria or cafes. Gant said employees are now given the discount only for healthy items.

“In a strategic way, the healthy menu options are cheaper than the unhealthy options,” Steele said.

That discount often means employees are offered healthy food at – and sometimes below – the cost for Mercy to buy and prepare the food, Gant said. Costs are offset by the more expensive, unhealthy food items as well as the meals served to patient visitors.

New menus items include roasted chicken breast with sauteed apples and walnuts, spinach crusted cod, paella, roasted Cajun salmon and chicken tandoori. Gant said the mushroom barley starch side item also is a popular favorite.

“We have a commitment to be an example of how to help our co-workers and other employees,” Steele said. “We want to lead by example.”

Gant said Mercy has expanded its nutritional labeling on its menu items to include the traditional information, such as calories, fat, protien, carbohydrates and sugars, as well as the numerical value of the item using the NuVal system and labels for gluten-free items.

CoxHealth has adopted a similar mission to entice employees to eat healthily on campus.

“We want to incentivize our employees to make those healthy selections, by No. 1 educating them – putting the information out in front of them – and then incentivizing them with the reduced pricing on the healthier items,” said Administrative Director of Food and Nutrition Dan Richardson.

“We are a hospital – we are trying to walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk,” he said.

Preparing menus and food for the campus at Cox South, Cox North and the Meyer Orthopedic and Rehabilitation Hospital, Richardson oversees a $4 million food budget contracted with U.S. Foods.

Chef Scott Horned, classicly trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., has been with Cox for nearly 10 years, creating the menu and overseeing the production of nearly 6,100 daily meals served across CoxHealth.

Richardson said Cox strives to keep prices for guests and visitors comparable to what can be found at area grocery stores – translating to about $5 for a premade salad, though the salads self-prepared at the salad bar are priced at $0.31 per ounce.

Cox employees receive a discount for cafeteria and cafe purchases, though healthy meals have a steeper subsidy, Richardson said. Those subsidies are applied to the price shown to the customer rather than a discount applied by the cashier. Likewise, unhealthy meal selections are priced to make a higher profit.

“If you’ve got a chicken breast up here that’s at 50 percent (food cost), you just double the price of the cost of the product. So if it cost you a dollar, you charge $2. But you got a cheeseburger up here, and it cost you a dollar, you would charge $3,” he said.

Roughly 40 percent of the food produced in CoxSouth’s kitchen is prepared for patients, and billed as part of the room charge, Richardson said.

“We basically break even on employee sales, and our pricing for our guests are based on what we would expect them to pay in the community for a similar product,” he said.