Portion control is something that most of us are aware of (and battle with frequently!) but when it comes to mealtimes in the care and senior living sector, portion and serving size are especially important.

Care home operators are managing the complex nutritional requirements for the Elderly generation alongside often, tight budgets. Balancing profit margins whilst ensuring the wellbeing of your residents is without doubt, a difficult challenge but our CaterCloud solution has an abundance of features that help you do just that.

CaterCloud’s costing tool is a huge benefit to our care and senior living clients, and in the weekly meal planner, you can see LIVE, the average cost per resident, per day (CPRD) throughout the week. This ensures that meals are created within daily budgets, without compromising on nutritional values.

Here’s how it works:

The CPRD calculates in real time when each dish is added to the meal plan. With each meal added, CaterCloud takes the recipe data and calculates the daily and weekly average. The data is live and uses simplistic visuals allowing you to see in real time, if your designed meal plan is on target, near to target or outside of target using a colour coded traffic light visual.

You have visibility of the menus for each day of the week, along with all the dishes assigned to them, and the cost per portion is displayed nicely next to each dish. What’s better is that this view can be changed to display nutritional values to assist with amending the weekly meal plan if your RDA targets are not achieved. Pretty nifty hey?

You have the flexibility to remove dishes and swap them easily for another dish that better suits your targets. Plus, you can also search by key tags such as ‘fortified,’ ‘vegetarian’ etc., which is helpful when you are unsure which dish to add to your menu but want to search for certain types of dishes you have tagged.

This information is easily exported with full daily breakdowns, giving you the visibility needed to see if any days are exceeding your CPRD or RDA targets (for e.g., Fridays are higher fat/calorie days and may take the nutritional targets for the week outside the targets you have set). Using the data to drill down into the information by day gives an extensive view of where meal plan changes may be required as CPRD, and nutritional info is viewable by day rather than just the whole week, meaning you’re in full control.

CaterCloud, is the only menu management tool you will ever need. It enables your teams to manage menus, stay on top of food safety (HACCP controls – compliant label printing), understand portion control, and costs, giving you a complete overview of your operation at the click of a button.

With a competitive and simple pricing structure, no up-front or costly upload fees, and no complicated hoops for you to jump through – what are you waiting for? Join us today and take advantage of our 30-day FREE trial here.

Gemma May Spilling