Eating Well priorities aims to make it easier for your workforce to eat fresh, healthy food every day, supporting their energy levels, their wellbeing and the health and productivity of your workplace. These priorities will help support access to a wide range of vegetables, fruit, and water; and to remove temptation by reducing access to processed foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt.
1. Increase access to fresh, healthy food in the workplace.
This could include making fruit and vegetables available as snacks, running or supporting a food or plant growing project from your workplace, taking on or sharing a workplace allotment or growing space. If you have a staff canteen, or provide food in other ways, you could make sure that there are healthy options everyday at a reasonable cost.
2. Reduce availability of highly processed food.
This could include finding alternative healthy snacks, or agreeing to only have high fat, salt or sugary foods in the office for celebrations. In a large workplace – consider grouping celebrations together once a week. Commit to remove unhealthy food and drink from vending machines as soon as possible. Ask for a healthy offer when you bring in a new machine (or renew your contract), or consider removing vending machines if you have local shops nearby. What you lose in income could be made back in improved health and reduced work absence.
3. Easy access to free drinking water.
This could include providing staff with water bottles, or signing up to the Refill campaign which offers free water bottle refills to visitors to buildings. Find out more about the Refill campaign HERE.
4. Make it easy to bring in food from home.
This could include reviewing food preparation and storage facilities available in the workplace and making improvements if needed, incentivising people to bring healthy home-made lunches to save themselves money and improve their wellbeing.
5. Access to weight management services
Living Well Workplaces can provide access local weight management services. These services can be accessed by your staff to help them lose weight, learn more about healthy living and improve lifestyle habits.
