Monitoring Food Service Guidelines

Monitoring tracks progress in the implementation of your food service guidelines initiative.  You can track or audit progress by determining what foods and beverages are offered in the various food venues and assessing whether those foods and beverages meet your specific standards for food service guidelines. A baseline assessment of the food environment with periodic tracking will allow you to see progress and maintenance in meeting standards over time.

Using Checklists to Monitor Compliance

Checklists are the simplest and most targeted data collection tool to determine whether the standards of your food service guidelines are being met. A compliance checklist is a short list of the specific food, nutrition, and behavioral design requirements that can be measured onsite through a relatively quick inspection. In general, checklists can be used to measure whether the foods and beverages offered meet your food service guidelines standards.

Most checklist items should be able to be assessed by a staff member with minimal training and with minimal assistance from the food service manager and food service staff. However, the amount of time and assistance required will depend upon the specific standards being assessed. For example, standards specifying the availability of a minimal number of fruit or vegetable options may be easy to measure. Standards based upon nutrients or ingredients, such as sodium or trans fats may be more difficult to assess if the facility does not display nutrition labels. Ensuring that food service guidelines include requirements for nutrition labeling or signage to indicate healthy items will not only assist patrons in selecting healthy options but will also allow easier assessment of standards. Finally, standards which specify that certain foods be made available during a specific season (for example fresh fruits and vegetables) or on a regular but non-daily basis (such as requiring fish served twice per week) may also require examination of menu rotation schedules or consultation with staff.

If you specify the frequency that monitoring will occur for each setting and venue, you can ensure the sustainability of your food service guidelines efforts. In some cases, food service managers can complete the compliance checks after they are sufficiently trained. Including this requirement in food service contracts is a good way to ensure long term sustainability of compliance. Occasional training and independent inspections by your personnel or contractor should be included to ensure data quality and consistency across facilities. When this is not possible, worksite wellness committee members can sometimes be trained to aid in compliance monitoring.