Who’s counting the calories?

In 2012, the Department of Health issued a missive calling on restaurants and fast food operations around the country to start labelling the calorie counts of the dishes they serve on their menus.

The objective was to offer consumers a better understanding of what they eat, in the hope that they would opt for the healthier option, and thus put a brake on the march towards obesity.

Consumers have shown themselves to be overwhelmingly in favour of the initiative, but some 18 months on, why have a large numbers of restaurants yet to get to grips with the initiative? Is it a realistic proposition for them? And what has happened to the promise from Minister for Health James Reilly to legislate if restaurants don’t label their menus?

The move to introduce calorie labelling on menus is not exclusive to Ireland. Some states in the US have imposed similar measures, and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), which is leading the initiative at the Minister’s behest, says evidence from other countries shows “it is very successful and it does work”.

Consumers appear to want it. An FSAI consultation process involving some 300 submissions from the industry and more than 3,000 from consumers, showed they were largely in favour of it.

Prof Mary Flynn, chief specialist in public nutrition with the FSAI, says that she was “blown out of the water” by the response.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says.

However, the response from restaurants has been less than overwhelming. Flynn concedes that restaurants complying are “still small numbers”, while the Department of Health is unable to provide a figure.

Adrian Cummins, chief executive of the Restaurants Association of Ireland (RAI), asserts that there has been “zero uptake” among the 2,200 members of the RAI, noting that at a recent meeting in Kerry, members “unilaterally and collectively said it’s unworkable for small restaurants”.

"I'm not disappointed [with the take-up]. I'm a realist. I know how complicated and hard a job it is," says Flynn.

Embracing the initiative
McDonald's is one chain which has embraced the initiative, starting it in company-owned restaurants in August 2012 and rolling it out through the franchise network in January last year, while Starbucks and Insomnia have also embraced it.

But does labelling menus actually change behaviour?

In the US, a study by Carnegie Mellon University found putting calorie labels on menus really has “little or no effect” on people’s ordering behaviours and other surveys back this up.

As Flynn herself concedes, literature from the US experience shows that only 15 per cent of customers use calorie information.

Audrey Gargan, owner of Japanese restaurants Sushi King, says people who are already aware of what they eat will take notice of the calorie counts, and those who don’t, won’t.

In September 2012, she got all her dishes tested at a lab, at a cost of about €100 per item. Since then, she has noticed increased demand for her chicken ramen soup, which comes in at just 334 calories.

However, overall she has found that it’s “people who are conscious anyway” who have responded most to the labelling, such as those who are very weight conscious, or those who are coeliac.

While Ray Farrelly, head of communications with the McDonald’s chain in Ireland, can’t give an indication of the impact the move has had “for commercial reasons”, he does note that while some people are keen to be given the information, equally there are those who “rail against” it.

So is it an initiative worth pursuing and is it reasonable to expect restaurants to comply with it?

For Gargan, it’s a difficult challenge. “I think it’s impossible to have calorie count on menus. If you’re cooking something from scratch, or if you have a different chef, the portions will always be slightly out. For me it’s not so hard because I have 30 different types of sushi rolls, which don’t change from year to year. But it’s very prohibitive for a small place to do it.”

Indeed, drawing on Northern Ireland’s experiences of moving to calorie labelling, Flynn notes that in one instance, no one working in a restaurant had recipes for their food, so someone had to watch a chef cook and write down what he was doing.

While accuracy might be an issue as a result, Flynn asserts that labels won’t have to be precise down to the last 10 calories, noting that there could be an accuracy range of between 20-30 per cent.

Cummins fears, however, that potential inaccuracies of labelling could leave the industry “wide open for massive litigation down the road”, whereby people claim that the food that they were served had a greater fat content than was claimed.

Another issue for restaurants is the costs of complying with menu labelling, which can be between €5,000-€10,000 per restaurant, according to the RAI.

And what of plans to legislate to force restaurants to comply? When launching the initiative in July 2012, Mr Reilly said he would review it at the end of that year, “and if I’m not satisfied that people are playing ball, particularly big chains, I’ll legislate”.

Little action
It's now 2014 and little action has been taken. The Department of Health did not respond to a question on the issue of legislation.

For now, the next step is an online tool that has been developed by the FSAI to help restaurants work out the calorie content of their dishes free. This should be available from early next year.

The FSAI is also carrying out an evaluation of the scheme to date.

In the meantime, if you are a consumer who would like to see more calories on menus, take Flynn’s advice. “If you feel happy, say it to the restaurant; otherwise it might disappear,” she says.