Bite-sized moves toward healthier hospital menus

Through a grant program, Partnerships to Improve Community Health (PICH), Northern Maine Medical Center (NMMC) in Fort Kent, Maine, began putting changes into place that have laid the groundwork for improving availability, accessibility and consumption of healthier food and beverages.

Now nearing the completion of the three-year grant, Community Outreach Coordinator Kim Parent of Power of Prevention/Cary Medical Center, describes NMMC’s nutritional services department as a success story.

At the outset, Parent posed three changes in three areas—policy, procurement and environmental—to the hospital’s foodservice department.

First, a policy change: For some time, NMMC had been offering free drinking water in pitchers in the cafeteria. The grant program pushed to make that an official policy that the hospital could set in stone.

“We wrote a policy and put it in the nutritional services handbook,” Parent says. “They had been offering free water to promote healthy water intake habits, but there had been nothing in place to protect that.”

Recently, Free Fresh Fruit Fridays have begun, and “employees really seem to enjoy it,” says Robin Damboise, director of human resources at NMMC.

The next step led to bigger changes. Three years ago, the hospital was buying just about all entrees premade and frozen. So with Parent’s help, the food and nutrition staff began identifying a few recipes they could start making from scratch. The facilities were up to the task; it just hadn’t been done previously.

Nutrient analysis was a big part of the process. A lightened-up lasagna recipe was one of the first tests, and it came out great. Another was Italian wedding soup, something that can be made with fresher ingredients and less sodium than canned soup. 

“Making entrees from scratch can cost less to produce, and sales of those items has increased,” Parent says.

For the environmental impact piece, a change in portion sizes provided a way to reduce food waste. Sandwiches, salads and soups are now all available in half sizes. Similar to Panera, customers can now get a half soup and a half sandwich, for example, but this change also has the effect of stopping people from overeating.

“A lot of us feel like we should eat what’s on our plate, and that leads to overeating,” Parent says. “This allows people to better control their portion sizes and get more fruits and vegetables, since you can just get a half salad on the side, not a whole big salad.”

Data shown that a significant number of people are taking advantage of the soup program now that it’s available in the smaller size.

However, there has been a bit of pushback on the portion sizes and the healthier food from employees, Damboise says.

“They like the home fries and other fried items,” she says, “And also, on the cooks, it’s a bit more difficult, as change always is.”

Damboise predicts that key factors in keeping the positive changes rolling will be helping employees to understand the benefits of healthier food—not the sacrifices to be made.

Healthier snacks are also making their way onto the retail side, the selection of which will be based on how they sell, Damboise says.