United States
Industry trends
Currently the Healthcare foodservice market represents approximately $10 billion in purchases. The opportunities lie in Hospitals, Senior Living and Long Term Care. Technomic is forecasting 0.8% real growth in Healthcare in 2012, the largest of which resides in Hospitals.
Unilever Food Solutions understand your business and knows that the following issues are ones that you face every day:
- Emphasizing good-for-you foods, special dietary needs, ethnic and on-trend food desires
- Capturing the growth in retail breakfast and snacks, while maintaining share of lunch
- Meeting the growing consumer demand for grab-and-go solutions and portability
- Keeping up with changing nutritional guidelines and demands such as sodium, gluten and trans fat
Patient and guest satisfaction is critical and many hospitals have made dramatic changes to their food offerings, and on into retail as well. They have taken a more commercial retail approach, and increased quality in some instances, more ethnic foods, healthy meals in cafeterias, etc.
Another big change we've seen in the past couple years is the increase in a Room Service approach to patient feeding. This allows patients to select from a menu directly from their room, when they'd like to eat versus a set menu at a set time. Not only has this had great impact on patient satisfaction thus far, but has even had impact for the business in lowering food costs. We expect to see this trend continue.
And of course, we know that managing food costs and food waste is always a constant challenge. We have invested countless hours working with chefs and operators to understand how we can help you make your business more successful. To learn more about how Unilever Food Solutions can help you tackle these and other challenges, click here to find out about our Services:
