Gregg Wallace teams up with Just Eat for healthy eating pilot scheme

The delivery company is trailing a three-month mentoring scheme for restaurants across Birmingham to help them expand their healthy food offer. Insights from the scheme will be used to create a programme to offer support to the thousands of Just Eat independent restaurant partners in the UK.

Wallace and Radcliffe have visited 10 restaurants in Birmingham to discuss aspects including adding healthier items to their menus to more effectively marketing the healthiest dishes to customers. As part of the project, each restaurant will now trial tailored changes to their menus to help them meet increasing demand for healthier choices. 

The participating restaurants, which Just Eat says represent a variety of different cuisine types, have also benefited from a free trial of Nutritics, a tool that calculate the nutritional value of menu items, for the duration of the pilot. Restaurants that are part of the scheme are Rubery Fish Bar, Food Republic, Caspian Pizza, Sophie’s Pizza and Pasta, Slice of New York, Shazan'z Kebab House, Rumana’s, Big John’s, Mahfil Restaurant, and Chop & Wok.

“As someone who has recently transformed my own diet, I know that takeaways can be enjoyed as part of a healthy lifestyle - but it’s not always easy to find those options,” says Wallace.

“Customers need to be able to find a healthy option every time they order in. Most restaurants we visited were already actively taking steps, whether that is adding new healthier dishes or exploring where they can swap ingredients, but there’s always more that can be done.”

At the end of the project, Just Eat will analyse restaurant and customer feedback and develop a broader programme of support for its entire restaurant partner base across the UK. This will offer all of Just Eat’s 58,000 restaurant partners the tools, advice and incentivisation to make beneficial changes. 

“More and more of our customers are looking for something healthy, and we’re seeing sales increasingly driven by the popularity of our grilled meat and fish options with healthy sides,” says Shajan Ahmed, chef at Shazan'z Kebab House. “We’re really pleased to be part of this project as we look to add even more nutritious and balanced options to our menu to cater to this demand.”

The pilot follows research by Just Eat that found that 52% of restaurants say they get requests from customers for healthier options and that 79% of restaurants believe their customers want to start eating more healthily but don't know where to start. It also found that 25% of restaurants used special offers to market their healthier dishes.

“Consumers are increasingly looking to enjoy takeaways as part of a healthy balanced diet - but research we carried out earlier this year showed that less than a third think they can do so currently," says Andrew Kenny, UK Managing Director at Just Eat.

“As a platform that offers more than 100 different cuisine types, we are using our reach to help our restaurant partners to tap into and further drive this demand. This programme is just the first step for us as we look to create sustainable change across the industry.”