Why Health-e Meal Planner?

…because we believe that menu planning drives your business.

When you get right down to it, your menu is sitting in the driver’s seat of your school foodservice program. Imagine your day without a menu! Your customers wouldn’t know what you were serving, your employees wouldn’t know what food to buy or what they needed to make and you wouldn’t know if what you served was in compliance with USDA nutritional regulations. Without a menu, there’s nothing to order, there’s no meal that you can get reimbursed for and there won’t be any need for customers, employees, facilities or advertising!. Without a menu, everything stops.

At Health-e Pro, we believe that when you get the menu right, you have the key to building a successful food service program.

With a menu:

-You can begin to control your food costs
-You can manage labor costs
-You can track products that sell versus products that are wasted
-You can market effectively to students, parents and staff
-You can identify every nutritional detail to ensure compliance

Knowledge, the Key to Understanding

As school food service professionals, you are surrounded by the over arching principle that “Knowledge IS power.” Every one of your customers are being educated daily so that they will have the power to shape their future, their lives and their world. You live it daily as you produce healthy, attractive and compliant meals. A strong menu is power for your business. Knowledge of which products sell, how much they cost, how much is wasted, how many people it takes to prepare and serve your customers are all essential details that will help guide you to be the most efficient you can be with your budget dollars and your people resources.

It’s all in the Details

If you ‘think’ you’re serving ‘about’ the same menu as last year to ‘probably’ the ‘same number’ of students and that ‘most’ of them come back each day, then you’ll ‘maybe’ know whether you’re compliant when review time comes around. If you’re serving Product X this year because you seem to remember that you got a ‘good deal’ last year from your supplier, you are not working with details.

However, when it’s easy to find out what you were serving last week/month/year and you know what you paid and what the current cost of your meals are, then you can make instant, strategic, cost effective decisions. Details matter. A good menu has all the details.

Leverage versus Spending: Time and Dollars

When it comes to managing your business, the bottom line is often the measure of success or failure. However, shrewd managers know that it’s not how much you spend or save but how much value you gain for the money spent or saved. For instance, leveraging your resources happens when you know you can’t stop spending money on food so you determine which foods and meals increase customer traffic or raise your profit margin. Leveraging your time means doing what you must do and making sure you aren’t doing the same work twice.

Health-e Meal Planner should be the first tool you use for both of these examples. The software puts all your menu, production and food data in one place, leveraging your time and effort. Our costing menu helps you see your cost per meal at a glance. You can quickly determine if substituting another product enables you to still serve a compliant menu AND reduce your cost per meal. Likewise, leveraging your time spent planning a menu means not having to search for and re-enter product information for purchasing or for updating a third party app as well as your website when you want to get your menu information out to students and parents. Health-e Meal Planner’s one click publishing capability eliminates redundant work and simplifies your life. Now that’s leverage!

Keeping Students and Parents in the Know, NOW!

Today’s families are media and web savvy. They EXPECT accurate information and they expect it to be available NOW. What’s a food service program manager supposed to do? Smart operators turn to Health-e Pro’s web and mobile app capabilities. As already mentioned, our one-click capability not only saves time, but makes your job of presenting and maintaining menu information easy. When it takes multiple steps and additional hours that you don’t have, these tasks are the first to fall through the cracks. Now, Health-e Meal Planner can even power electronic menu boards simply and easily.

Compliance: Routine vs Crisis

When everything is running smoothly and efficiently, routine keeps it that way. When your routine is interrupted with a crisis, efficiency suffers. If your program seems to be running from crisis to crisis, then a closer look at each aspect is warranted. A crisis diverts resources, people, money and time. Other jobs and tasks become compromised because your resources get taken away to deal with the crisis at hand.

At Health-e Pro, we encourage our customers to begin with their menu. Your menu tells you what to order, when to order it, and how to serve it. Employee training flows directly from the items on your menu and how they are prepared and how they are to be served. Your menu itself needs to be created in a way that allows you to quickly make menu substitutions and updates to your website with those changes. Understanding the impact of cost increases, with hard numbers based on meals actually served can minimize or reveal problem areas. A good menu planning software can help you instantly, at a glance see how well you’re doing and give insights into the most optimal ways to adapt.

We’ve Walked in Your Shoes

Health-e Meal Planner was created by professionals just like you, who understand the importance of good, simple, accurate, menu planning. The professionals at Health-e Pro know that learning new software and collecting all the data can be a daunting task. Everything from our visual pass/fail planning screen to our extensive product database and our tablet friendly production records is designed to make your job easier.

From the time you first experience our software, our team of trainers and experts are there to ensure that you are comfortable and proficient. That’s why we don’t charge for training, we want you to be able to use it well AND we want to make sure that the software is optimized for the way YOU run YOUR program.

You don’t just buy software, you gain a team of experts dedicated to helping you succeed.