Nutrition management in food services - a new education to improve public health in Finland

Abstract

Nutrition knowledge in food services is important for public health, by nutritional quality of eating out. Nutrition competencies are needed in separate levels: cooks in preparing healthy food, kitchen managers and chefs in developing healthy menus and food service managers in organizing food services customer oriented and heath promoting way. The first level, on-line learning material and open access test have been in use since 2009. A number of completed tests (n = 11176, Jan 2016) show the importance of it and the need for the next level.The objective is to develop the next level of open access nutrition education for kitchen managers, chefs and food service managers. The education should be able to complete while working full-time. Also the education should contain benchmarking from other countries and different type of food services. The questions are: how to organize the education, what it should contain and how the nutrition knowledge can be implemented rapidly to food services.