Asking attendees about their dietary restrictions and preferences—and accommodating them—is part of any F&B 101 curriculum. Delegates’ meals affect their satisfaction with the event and, ultimately, the bottom line, so accommodating dietary needs is part of the job.

But some planners see a further twist coming in this already challenging responsibility.

Over time, attendee requests for special meals have expanded beyond vegetarian, kosher, and allergen-free options. As dietary trends have emphasized nutrition-savvy, gut-friendly, plant-based food and more Americans are committed to personalized nutritional approaches, meeting professionals have more to accommodate. It’s now relatively common to host vegan and gluten-free attendees, and those with a variety of other restrictions and preferences.

Veteran event director Jill Birkett, vice president, travel group, at Questex, collects F&B requirements in an open-ended write-in space on the registration form, and recently she and her colleagues are seeing a change.

Birkett notes an uptick in attendees sharing hyper-specific, exhaustively comprehensive information about their dietary restrictions and preferences.

“At this point, I think we’re all used to requests for gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, that kind of a thing. We’ve all been doing that for years. But more and more, when we ask the [dietary accommodations] question, we’ve been getting very complex answers, things like, ‘I can eat peas if they’re boiled, but not steamed.’ … ‘I can’t eat green vegetables; I can only eat yellow vegetables.’ … ‘I can eat fish if it doesn’t have a sauce or spice.’ Really, really specific. I mean, paragraphs.”

“In an event of, say, 300 people, we’ll have at least 10 people who write paragraphs about their food preferences,” she notes. “Accommodating all of that, to me, has gotten so much more difficult.”

One approach Birkett uses to accommodate intensely specific requirements is to plan more buffets “because you can have an assortment of food there, of course, and label it. We’ve gotten very much into labeling the foods on the buffet with all the ingredients.”

The challenge: “Sometimes, the properties don’t do a great job of this,” Birkett says. “They might just write ‘jerk chicken,’” rather than spell out the onion, garlic, ginger, cloves, and other ingredients that attendees could be sensitive or allergic to.”

Best Practices

Tracy Stuckrath, founder of Thrive! Meetings & Events and host of the Eating at a Meeting podcast, has seen lengthy, specific attendees requests from time to time. Whether or not the trend is growing, she says the best practice is to direct delegates to select their food restrictions and preferences from a checklist on the registration form, which helps to deemphasize the “other” write-in option.

For buffet labeling, Stuckrath suggests listing just the allergens. “For an event buffet, you do not have the time to have people looking and reading all the ingredients. However, I highly recommend that you put the full ingredient list on the event app, and you make sure there’s a printout of it in a banquet captain's hand.”

She also recommends that the banquet event orders include allergens on every single item. “I don’t think there’s room on a BEO to put the entire ingredient list, but that data needs to be known to somebody from the event team and somebody from the hotel team in order to answer questions.”

More advice:

• Discuss dietary needs during the initial planning stages with the venue and/or caterer. Early collaboration is key.
• Understand how kitchen and wait staff will be made aware of guests’ requests.
• Don’t forget allergen and/or ingredient labelling of foods offered during breaks, not just meals.
• Leave plenty of space on the buffet to avoid cross contamination of items.
• Consider dishes for your group that are, for example, gluten-free and dairy-free to accommodate multiple requirements with one dish. Similarly, for your meat-free options, could a fully vegan meal work for vegetarians as well?

This article was originally published in our sister publication, MeetingsNet.

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