Technical Cards Instrument for Health and Sustainability Promotion

The standardization of the meal production process benefits the nutritionist’s work, facilitating the planning of daily work, training employees, reducing food waste and eliminating interference due to doubts. In addition, the guarantee of the sensorial and hygienic-sanitary quality of the meals involves the anticipation of the production stages to determine, among other factors, the critical control points and environmental, social and financial sustainability [1]. For the food handler the standardization of processes facilitates the execution of tasks without the need for frequent orders, in addition to providing more security in the occupational environment. In part food services, most of the problems are due to employees who work in different shifts, performing the same task in different ways, causing variability in the production process and, consequently, loss of productivity and not least, lack of standardization of nutritional, sensory and hygienic-sanitary qualities of preparations and meals. In view of the evidence already mentioned, there is an increasingly current need for knowledge of all the ingredients that make up the preparations and their preparation techniques. Evidently, knowledge about the content of macro and micronutrients is essential for the decision-making on whether or not the preparations should be on the menus, but information such as Energy Density, Sodium Content, protein quality, presence of Ultra-processed foods began to be increasingly important in the face of the obesity epidemic that is plaguing many countries [2]. Another point to be highlighted is the true epidemic of food allergies, present in the population today, which makes the information about the content of the preparations even more decisive for decision making about what to eat, and when to eat it. For all these factors, the Technical Preparation Sheet (FTP) is an “instrument” of managerial, operational and nutritional support, very important for nutritional care of sick and healthy communities. In addition to its importance in determining the nutritional quality of preparations, FTP can also assist in calculating the cost of production in restaurants, being a determining factor for the financial sustainability of such establishments, analyzing the costeffectiveness of maintaining ingredients, preparations and menus. Even in the implementation of Nudge that strengthens healthy and sustainable choices, FTP are tools whose content is capable of assisting in decision making, eschoosing the best sequence to be offered. Although FTP has so much information relevant to promoting appropriate practices in the provision of healthy and sustainable meals, it is often absent from restaurants and food services. Possibly because of the difficulty in building it. The difficulties range from the lack of instruments necessary for its preparation (scales, thermometers, stopwatches, etc.) to the difficulty in terms of the time to perform the tests to determine the nutritional and sensorial quality of the preparations and their adaptation to the food culture of the diners [3,4]. If information is important for a healthy population, what about vulnerable populations such as hospitalized, incarcerated, children and the elderly? Certainly, if FTP were present in restaurants and food services, we would have accurate and reliable information about food consumption, as 20.16 million meals were distributed to the Brazilian population in 2021 [5-7]. The carbon footprint, the consumption of water, electricity and the losses with the removal, of supposedly, inedible parts of the food can be equated from the FTPs, as they contain all the information, enabling the necessary modifications to make sustainable, culturally sensitive, nutritionally adequate restaurants and a precious source of information fighting the triple burden of malnutrition–undernutrition, hunger, and obesity, often in the same scenario. In view of the above, the implementation of FTPs will promote the maintenance and recovery of consumers’ health in different food production spaces, minimizing food contamination by monitoring critical control points; food waste, through full use; the impact on the environment, through the reduction of water, energy and waste consumption, as well as the promotion of nutritionally and sensorially adequate meals, which can provide nutritionists, food handlers and the community, with information about what they are consuming and which the impact of the consumption of these preparations on the environment [8].

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