VCC Conference addresses the great health debate
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For one day only, the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC) played host to the vending industry as the venue for the first ever Vending Choice Conference. Run by the AVA, in conjunction with the Vending Choice Coalition, the aims of the conference were to increase the choice of products available from vending machines, to introduce new products to the vending stream and to enable vending operators to understand the changing needs of consumers. Running alongside the conference, which was free to attend, some suppliers had taken table-top exhibition space to demonstrate their products and services for vending.
Delegates were welcomed to the event by Jonathan Hilder, CEO of the AVA and Gillian White, Chair of the Vending Choice Coalition. Professor Adrian Peters, Dean of Cardiff School of Health Sciences, opened the conference with an overview of the school, its courses and ways in which it could work with the vending industry.
Mike Watson of Calypso Soft Drinks focused on the vending of soft drinks in a presentation entitled Regulation as Opportunity. He looked back over the changes of the last four years in the provision of school meals, largely triggered by the Channel 4 screening of 'Jamie's School Dinners' where celebrity chef Jamie Oliver exposed some of the shocking quality of the food and drink available to our children through the school meals provision. Love him or hate him, Jamie certainly shook up the system and the response of Government was to set up the School Food Trust (SFT). The result was that just one year later the final draft of regulations was published governing what could and couldnt be offered to school children.
For the soft drinks industry, the lack of compliance of the major soft drinks brands opened up new opportunities for smaller, more specialist suppliers. As the larger manufacturers turned their backs on the market as being too small to warrant the bespoke development and manufacture of a new range of drinks, smaller and more agile manufacturers, such as Calypso, did respond and it now claims to be the leading manufacturer of soft drinks in the school drinks market. In English schools the regulations require soft drinks to contain either pure water, pure fruit juice or a combination of the two with a minimum of 50 per cent juice and no added sugar or sweeteners. Drinks can be still or sparkling. The Calypso Soft Drinks range includes pure juices, Fairtrade pure juices, Aquajuice - a blend of juice and natural mineral water - Calypso Juicy Aid - a blend of juice and sparkling water - and new Rapidz, which features Cola, Lemonade and Iron Brew in 330ml bottles. All of these products comply with the regulations. A further opportunity therefore exists for vending. With a wide range of compliant drinks available and a new generation of students coming through the system who accept these regulations as the norm, vending can help ease the financial pressures on catering services as a result of budget cuts, re-installing soft drinks machines offering a choice of compliant products.
Janette Briggs, a dietetic assistant at University Hospitals Bristol addressed the conference on the subject of Hospital Vending - Friend or Foe. University Hospitals Bristol comprises seven hospitals with some 1,100 beds. Its food policy is that hospital facilities are designed to be flexible and patient centred with the aim of providing and delivering an excellent experience of food service and nutritional care 24 hours a day.
Janette brought some much needed realism to the debate of vending in hospitals. Hospital, she said, is not necessarily the appropriate setting for making lifestyle choices as the hospitals 'customer' is likely to be seeking comfort from missed meals and distress and restricting the choice available to staff and visitors is not desirable practice. Consequently, at University Hospitals Bristol, restrictions are placed on hot beverages, but otherwise, staff, patients and visitors have the freedom to choose from crisps, biscuits, sandwiches, chocolate, water, fizzy drinks, juices, dried fruit and nuts and cereal bars from its vending machines.
She also highlighted the significant risk of malnutrition, which, she said, costs the NHS 13 billion a year (obesity costs just 3.5 billion). Up to 40 per cent of all patients admitted to hospital are at risk of malnutrition and the percentage increases once patients have been in hospital for one week. When a person is ill the body has an increased requirement for calories and protein and all these factors should be taken into account in the provision of a food service in hospitals.
John Dyson, food & technical affairs advisor to the British Hospitality Association, BHA, presented Healthy Vending - a Pragmatic Approach, which focused on the development of a Vending Standard as part of the Scottish Healthy Living Award.
The BHA is a trade association for the hospitality industry, representing 11,500 group and independent restaurants, every publicly listed hotel company and every major food service management company. Development work started on the Scottish Healthy Living Award Vending Standard in 2005 and it was launched to industry barely one year later. In 2008/9 a higher level standard was also introduced, aimed initially at the NHS.
The standard sets out some simple criteria for the balance of choices that must be offered through vending machines. For instance, a cold drinks machine must contain water, fruit juice and/or low fat milk and these options must be highlighted as 'healthy living choices' using the apple logo and prominently positioned in the machine. At least 70 per cent of soft drinks offered must be sugar-free and on NHS sites, all soft drinks within a machine must be sugar-free - defined as containing less than 0.5 grams of sugar per 100ml.
A similar approach is taken to vending snacks and confectionery items, utilising a simple nutrient profiling method. The system is said to help the consumer to maintain a healthy diet whilst providing choice and without the requirement for further unnecessary expenditure developing a whole new standard.
John Ferguson of Bettavend and Graham Kingaby of NIVO both addressed the conference from an operators point of view, with presentations entitled Product Supply to Operators and The Role of the Vending Buying Group respectively.
Finally, David Lloyd, director of the Food Industry Centre at UWIC, talked more about Zero to Five, the Food Industry Centre. Founded in the early 1990s, the centre has been involved with Knowledge Transfer Programmes and more recently, working with Food Network Wales, with the Knowledge Innovation Technology Exchange, KITE, programme.
The KITE Programme is a pan Wales advisory and implementation service in food technology related issues, including areas such as technical, microbiological, hygiene and product development to help clients achieve measurable outputs and clear financial, environmental and skill-based benefits and to maximise business performance.
The objectives of the Food Industry Centre include to facilitate the transfer of expertise from academic and technical staff to industry, to develop an applied research portfolio and delivery of interdisciplinary programmes, to contribute to developing a food strategy for Wales and to feed industrys technical needs with educational materials. With various fields of expertise, the centre has been involved with projects including new product development, supply chain improvements, assisting with new company start-ups and bacteria control.
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