UAE strives for diversity in food value chain
DUBAI MUNICIPALITY LAUNCHES DIGITAL PLATFORM TO ENSURE TRANSPARENCY IN MENUS
Parents can soon peek at what school canteens in Dubai serve their children, thanks to the launch of a digital platform by Dubai Municipality.
Students will now be served only healthy food rated and approved by Dubai Municipality through Food Watch, where the complete digital profile of all food businesses in Dubai and food items they sell is recorded, giving detailed information from farm to fork.
The platform lets food suppliers and caterers design a menu compliant with the municipality’s specifications and requirements and obtain approval electronically in real time, said Khalid Sharif Al Awadhi, CEO of Dubai Municipality for Environment, Health and Safety Sector.
As many as 70 categories of food groups have been restricted for sale in school canteens through the platform. Deli meat, chocolates and salted pretzels are among the food groups that will now be off limits to students in Dubai schools.
All nutrients, ingredients and allergens in food supplied to school canteens will now be declared on the Food Watch platform.
The school canteen section in Food Watch will also help parents know what food is being served to their children through the weekly menus that ■ schools can share with parents.
Eventually, the municipality plans to give parents direct access so that they can monitor the food served in school canteens, officials said after the launch of the platform.
Explaining how the platform works, Jehaina Hassan Al Ali, head of awareness and applied nutrition unit, told Gulf News that school canteen food items are now rated as healthy, acceptable and restricted based on their nutritional values evaluated by the municipality.
“These ratings are marked with smileys in green, yellow and red. They show happy, straight and sad faces respectively,” she said.
While designing the weekly menu for school canteens, suppliers can only choose food items rated with a green happy face and yellow straight face.
“We want them to give a good proportion of these two categories of food. Only then they will be issued a smart permit for selling those food items in school canteens,” Al Ali said.
She stressed the municipality is not restricting certain food items just because they are conventionally less nutritious.
“We are not banning all muffins, for example. If it is made of whole wheat, or oats and with other healthy ingredients, we approve it. We know kids want to have something innovative and tasty. We are making sure it is also healthy,” she said.
That is why food items with the yellow straight face rating are accepted even though they are not the healthiest options. For example, pasta-based dishes, chicken sandwich with mayonnaise etc.
of food restricted for sale in school canteens through the platform