BengalNews Reporters
The smell of fresh-baked bread hits the nose upon entrance to Five Points Bakery on Buffalo’s West Side.
Gooey cinnamon rolls, covered in icing, are among the baked goods sitting in glass cases at the front counter.
At this bakery, the cinnamon rolls are the healthiest sweet treat available, with 300 calories — plus 12 grams of protein and 24 percent of the daily value of fiber.
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| Kevin Gardner of Five Points Bakery |
Five Points Bakery was one of 200 businesses in Erie County that received a free trial version of the computer software, which normally costs $540 a year at minimum, and is one of two on the West Side that is as participating. Marco’s Italian Restaurant is also involved but could not be reached for comment.
Cheryll Moore of the Erie County Department of Health confirmed that Five Points and Marco’s were the only West Side businesses in the process of determining calorie contents for their menu items.
“Unless it’s gonna make them more money, they won’t do it. Unless it’s a law, they won’t do it,” she said of businesses that opted not to participate in the program. “It’s balancing finances with the right choice.”
The Healthy Choices Program is voluntary, but Moore said she expects that more independent restaurants will begin to use the MenuCalc software after Jan. 1, 2013, when chain restaurants with 20 or more locations will be required to provide nutrition facts.
Gardner said he analyzed his ciabatta bread, multigrain bread and cinnamon rolls because customers frequently inquired about nutritional values for those items. With the trial program, each business can input up to four recipes for analysis, which can then be adjusted as many times as needed until the business is satisfied with the numbers.
Moore said the initiative is not intended to force restaurants to change their recipes.
“The point of the Healthy Choices Program is to allow people to take into account what they’re eating on a daily basis,” she said.
Five Points specializes in whole-grain baked goods that are prepared with natural ingredients that are often produced locally. In Gardner’s case, modifying the recipes to make them as healthy as possible fits in with satisfying his customers’ needs.
“That’s an edge we have over every other bakery… Our stuff is a treat but it’s really good for you,” Gardner said. “Regardless of the cost, if we can get the information, if we can modify our recipes to make them even a little more attractive than they are now… I think it would generate a lot of new business for us.”
“It is really healthy for a bakery,” Gardner also added. “That’s the reason we wanted to get into it, because I think people would be shocked to see that it’s not empty calories,” Gardner said.
Moore indicated that cultural differences might have contributed to the lack of participation from West Side businesses, because some cultures view nutrition differently.
“I’m not going to tell the Spanish community not to eat all that rice,” Moore said. “It’s a staple of their culture.”
Moore added that she would like to see more cultural restaurants getting involved.
The lack of involvement could also be chalked up to lack of awareness. Moore said businesses were contacted when the program began, but owners of some West Side businesses said they had not heard of the initiative, including Boomerang's Bar and Grill and Sweetness 7 Cafe.
Sweetness 7 Café’s owner Prish Moran said that although many of her food items are high in calories, it doesn’t necessarily make them unhealthy, as some may assume, if nutrition facts were offered at her establishment.
“I just feel strongly that when people are eating fresh, homemade food the calories are going to be much different than with processed food,” she said, adding there is a significant nutritional difference between the cafe’s 400-calorie egg sandwich, made with free-range eggs, and its fast-food counterpart.
Moran also said recipe variation, such as adding extra butter on top of an item, could make calculated nutritional values inaccurate.
Nutritional information is still not available at Five Points, because Gardner would like to have all the labels done for his 30 or so menu items, then incorporate the change into a marketing campaign.
But with a business like Five Points Bakery, the process of calculating nutritional information can become tricky.
Some items in the bakery, such as eggs, oil and wheat, do not match the standards of those found in the MenuCalc program. Though MenuCalc offers subcategories of items, sometimes it does not allow Gardner to distinguish his specific product from the standard one.
Kevin Gardner speaks about a weak point of MenuCalc:
In order to increase accuracy in the calculations, Gardner would have to pay $600 to have each additional item analyzed in a lab. But still, he wants to.
“I’m going to do it, because it’s a part of a larger whole,” he said, “just like looking at nutritional information on a product can’t be a person’s whole basis for what they eat. But it is a part of it: People do want to know the calories, even if it’s not exact.”
-- Edited by Kaitlin Fritz
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