Edamam, a company that provides automated nutrition analysis solutions, announced a partnership with the United States Healthful Food Council (USHFC). Under the agreement, all USHFC REAL Certified and REAL25 restaurants will receive one year of free access to Edamam’s Nutrition Wizard. Restaurants wishing to utilize the USHFC’s “White Glove” nutrition service from a REAL credentialed Registered Dietitian will be able to do so at a reduced price.
Edamam’s real-time nutrition analysis service leverages proprietary natural language processing, information extraction and post-processing algorithms to append highly accurate nutrition data and diet tags to any recipe or ingredient list.
“By offering our service for free to each REAL Certified restaurant, we can help spark a change in attitude towards publishing nutrition data and highlighting the ease of doing so and the resulting benefit to diners and their health,” commented Victor Penev, Edamam’s founder and CEO.
To become REAL Certified, restaurants must satisfy prerequisites and earn sufficient points in the areas of Responsible (nutrition), Epicurean (preparation), Agricultural (sourcing) and Leadership (going above and beyond). Though menu labeling is not currently a requirement for REAL certification, it may be recognized in a future standard.
“The goal of REAL is to increase access to healthful and sustainable food, and transparency is a critical ingredient, especially in restaurants,” added Lawrence Williams, CEO of the USHFC. “The FDA recently finalized the menu labeling rules, providing one year for compliance, and we would like to do whatever we can to decrease the financial burden on the industry.”
Media contacts:
For Edamam
Victor Penev
victor@edamam.com
+1.646.378.8317
For USHFC
Melissa Rouse
melissa@ushfc.org
+1.808.960.4593
About United States Healthful Food Council (USHFC)
Established in 2011, the USHFC is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit dedicated to transforming America’s food system and fighting diet-related disease by realigning the food industry’s incentives with consumers’ health interests. The organization has certified restaurants, corporate cafes, college dining services in over 30 states, with financial support from the Tennessee Department of Health, the Park Foundation, the Mary Black Foundation, the Campbell Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President’s Grant Fund of the Princeton Area Community Foundation.
More information can be found at USHFC.org and REALCertified.org.
About Edamam
Edamam organizes the world’s food knowledge and provides nutrition data services and value-added solutions to health, wellness and food businesses. Using a proprietary semantic technology platform, it delivers real-time nutrition analysis and diet recommendations via APIs. Edamam’s technology helps customers answer for their clients the perennial question: “What should I eat?”
Edamam’s partners and clients include Nestle, Amazon, Conde Nast, Samsung and The New York Times.
For more information, please visit www.edamam.com or developer.edamam.com.
