Healthy food-habits in the workplace

New Delhi: People across all walks of life are experiencing a change in their day-to-day lifestyle; among all, corporate employees have seen a major transformation due to work from home setup. People now are inclined towards prioritising their health like never before. Hence there is an immense amount of innovation happening in the corporate kitchen to make the food at work exciting as well as healthy at the same time. The organisations are recognising the importance of employees' health and how food is linked to their productivity at work.

Food items that are served educate them with the number of calories it carries along. The workplace should encourage employees to buy foods that have been physically and chemically modified, such as salt-reduced cheese and skimmed milk, supposedly to make them healthier. This is mainly backed by the dual reason of ensuring good health of employees and enabling optimum productivity at work.

Looking at the larger picture, the change that the pandemic has brought in has enabled people to have a positive outlook towards healthy eating, which was considered dull and boring. Foodservice providers have included ingredients like milk with turmeric or masala milk with dry fruits to keep the cold at bay, deserts with honey and ginger to keep the itchy throat in check, tonic water to keep your stomach from indigestion, provide healthy soup options for snack time to avoid employees indulging in unhealthy eating habits or mix dry fruit sweets to keep the sweet craving in check and many more similar ingredients or recipes are prepared to keep the employees' health in check considering the pandemic.

A healthier food menu not only makes the employees happy; it increases their productivity level, so they feel more energetic and motivated. Kitchens should prepare a food menu that includes healthier options that are not heavy on dairy, pasta or fattening sauces, include grilled, broiled, baked or steamed foods, and limit items that are fried or sauteed have been shown to help people be more productive for longer.

As a practice, the variety of food served at the workplace is now limited as compared to the pre-Covid era and more importance has been given to the nutritional value. Along with food, varieties of teas and a healthy concoction of herbs to strengthen and calm the immunity, wherever applicable. Portion control is also essential for employees as it is one of the most lethal factors that causes almost every health problem.

As we foresee, there are a plethora of innovations we expect to come up in the next few years where there will be more importance given to individual dietary preferences that will be mapped through artificial intelligence. Going ahead every food service provider will highly consider the health and wellness of the employees while they are curating foods along with dietary solutions as it has a big impact on the workplace.