Nutritional Receipts
To feed the growing consumer hunger for nutritional information, restaurant operators continue to enlist new technologies.
For Ontario-based pita sandwich chain Extreme Pita, the answer may be something called the Nutricate Receipt System…
The Nutricate Receipt System, which automatically prints nutritional information on the customer receipt, is the brainchild of Jay Ferro, CEO of Nutricate Inc. Ferro is also part owner of Santa Barbara-based Silvergreen’s, and says he was inspired to develop the Nutricate Receipt System by the number of customer requests for the nutritional breakdown of menu items they get at the Silvergreen’s restaurants.
The system, which provides information for the foods a customer has actually ordered, is a great improvement over pre-printed nutritional “brochures”, according to Ferro. “The Nutricate System knows exactly what you are going to eat”, he said. “We enlisted a team of nutrition professionals to analyze the Silvergreens’ menu and calculate the nutritional information for each of more than 400 ingredients. Our sales rose by 25 percent in the year following the release of the dietary information and installation of the reporting technology”, Ferro said.
The results were so good at Silvergreen’s, Ferro decided to launch Nutricate Inc and offer his receipt-based nutrition information system to other restaurant chains.
Extreme Pita operator and Nutricate customer, Brett Weiss, seems pleased. He said of his reason for choosing the Nutricate system “We wanted to share information with consumers, but also to distinguish Extreme Pita from our competitors. Some of them use pre-printed labels, but those labels don’t tell the whole story,” he said. “People want to know, for example, what will happen ‘content-wise’ if they remove a slice of cheese from a sandwich, leave off the sauce or order a double portion of meat. And although Web-based tools are very useful for this purpose, not everyone thinks to look information up before they go to the restaurant.”
Implementation of the technology required that Extreme Pita provide Nutricate with detailed information about the ingredients and recipes on their menu. As soon as the this data was analyzed — a process of several weeks — Nutricate programmed the software for Extreme Pita. To maximize the marketing potential of every receipt issued and add value for customers, the operator also opted to specify that the software be configured to include messages in the form of questions, such as, “Did you know that if you substitute salsa for chipotle mayonnaise on your sandwich, you’ll save 4 grams of fat?” Coupon offers, such as “buy one, get one free,” were included as well.
Weiss says he also plans to deploy the Nutricate System in his new store in the Miranda Valley area of San Diego, which is scheduled to open in the second quarter. Seven franchised Extreme Pita stores in Arizona and three in Canada also are slated to deploy the system beginning in early February, Extreme Pita officials said.
Nutricate clients are responsible for providing the technology firm with recipe ingredient nutrition information and portion-size specifications tied to their menus. They can hire Nutricate to generate that data, pay another third-party service, draw on data compiled by their franchisor, if any are available, or do their own analysis using specialized software.
Nutricate said it charges from $25 to $100 per menu item analyzed to generate nutritional information, depending on the number of items being analyzed and their complexity.
Reports by Nation’s Restaurant News in mid 2005 indicated that some restaurateurs then were paying from $30 to $80 per dish for computer analysis relying on manufacturers’ reported nutrition values for ingredients or those generated by third-parties. Others were paying as much as $600 per item for chemical analysis of a prepared food, according to NRN.
In some cases, restaurant companies handling nutritional analysis in-house, using recipe programs or analytical applications of varying sophistication, had spent from $200 to several thousand dollars for software, alone; in addition to covering labor costs, such do-it-yourselfers may have paid additional fees to access third-party ingredient databases.
To cover the software license and system maintenance fees, Weiss said he pays Nutricate “the equivalent of a few dollars a day” per location.
Weiss explained that the system consists of a Nutricate receipt interceptor computer, or RIC, that physically resides beneath the thermal receipt printer that is part of the POS station in his Extreme Pita units. Order data entered into the ITS 2020 POS system used by Weiss moves through a router to the RIC, which, upon receiving the information, appends nutritional details and messaging, reformats the information in line with parameters pre-defined by Weiss and passes the information to the printer.
The receipt turned out in Weiss’ restaurants lists each item ordered, with a breakdown of its calorie, fat, carbohydrate and protein content. A calculation of percentage of daily values from each item purchased — reflecting figures for a daily intake of 2,000 and 2,500 calories alike — also is given, as is the total number of calories and fat, carbohydrate and protein grams in the entire meal.
Customer response to the receipts has been “overwhelmingly positive,” according to Weiss. “Both transaction counts and sales are up by 15 percent since we put the system in, and although it’s impossible to say the system is entirely responsible, I really think the receipts have sparked most of the increase,” he noted. “We have a loyalty card program, so we track our best customers. Before we started with the receipts, most came in once or twice every two weeks; now it’s once or twice a week.”
Beyond Extreme Pita and Silvergreens, Nutricate has yet to ink any additional agreements with operators. The existing version does not have a direct interface with operators’ POS systems, but the vendor is making available an alternative configuration for operators with more than 250 POS terminals fitted with the same POS software. In this configuration, the software is integrated with any existing POS hardware, thus eliminating the need for the RIC. All features offered on the receipt remain the same.
Tags: NRN, nutrition, technology
