Measure Reach and Impact

Monitoring and Evaluating Food Service Guidelines

At a glance

Evaluating food service guidelines implementation involves measuring reach and impact. This can help demonstrate effectiveness and track progress. See definitions and examples of reach and impact and a formula for calculating reach.

Healthcare worker getting a meal from a cafeteria.

Introduction

To evaluate food service guidelines, measuring reach and impact can demonstrate effective financial stewardship and communicate key accomplishments. Measuring reach and impact can also help you track progress of food service guidelines implementation.

Reach

Reach is the number or percentage of people, organizations, or communities affected by your food service guidelines initiative. Examples of reach are:

  • 15 hospitals out of 35 in our state (43%) have written food service into their organizational policies.
  • 200 employees out of 675 potential employees (30%) have eaten in our worksite cafeteria every day since food service guidelines implementation. Prior to implementation, 150 employees (22%) ate in the cafeteria.

Calculating Reach‎

You can use this formula to calculate reach. In this example, the unit of measure is people, but you could use other units such as organizations or communities.



(Number of people affected by your initiative ÷ Potential number of people affected by your initiative) X 100 = Percentage of people reached by your initiative.

Impact

Impact is the effect that your initiative has on people, organizations, or communities. One measure of impact is public health impact. For food service guidelines, public health impact could include weight loss or weight maintenance, decreased diet-related chronic diseases, or reduced mortality.

Because it may take a long time to observe these outcomes, you may need to consider proxy measures instead. Proxy measures can include purchase of healthier foods by the consumer or purchase of healthier foods by the vendor. Proxy measures can include number of trays of healthier entrées made, served, and discarded or number of healthier items on menu rotations. Examples are:

  • Purchases of healthy entrées increased by 27% following food service guidelines implementation.
  • The number of healthy meals on the menu rotation in a hospital cafeteria increased from 6 per six-week cycle to 15.

See data by setting for other proxy measure ideas.

Toolkit links

Farmer with box of fresh produce.
Track Co-Benefits of Food Service Guidelines
Other benefits may include support of locally sourced foods and environmentally friendly practices.
Icons for the four Building Blocks of Food Service Guidelines. The four icons are 1) trowel and brick wall 2) shaking hands 3) a checklist and 4) a street sign going in three directions.
Food Service Guidelines Implementation Toolkit
Describes how to use the four Building Blocks of the Food Service Guidelines Implementation Toolkit.
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Content Source:
National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP)