More ingredients, more possibilities: expanding your menu with FoodChecker

More ingredients, more diverse menus FoodChecker makes menu planning easier Making healthy eating more inclusive Get creative with your next menu More ingredients mean more possibilities for healthier, more varied, and more inclusive menus.

Good news for menu planners, cooks, and food service teams! FoodChecker continues to grow, making it easier to create healthy, varied, and inclusive menus.

Food is a powerful way to bring people together. The meals we serve can reflect diverse cultures, traditions and tastes, while helping people enjoy a wide variety of nutritious foods.

That’s why we’re excited to see the FoodChecker ingredient database continue to expand, with the addition of over 100 new ingredients, including those commonly used in a wide range of cuisines including African, Middle Eastern and South American cuisines, as well as native Australian ingredients.

These updates mean more choice when you’re creating and assessing recipes for your organisation.

In this article

More ingredients, more diverse menus

Whether you’re planning meals for a school, early childhood service, health service, workplace, sports club or another food service setting, variety is an important part of creating an appealing menu.

Having a broader range of ingredients available in FoodChecker can help you explore recipes and menu ideas beyond the familiar. Ingredients from different cuisines can introduce new flavours, colours, textures and cooking traditions, while giving the people you serve more opportunities to experience different foods.

For example, incorporating ingredients commonly used in African or South American cooking can be a fantastic way to expand your menu and celebrate food diversity. Australian native ingredients can also provide opportunities to connect people with local food traditions and introduce something new.

A diverse menu doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Consider how you could adapt an existing recipe by swapping an ingredient, adding a new vegetable, grain, legume, herb or spice, or drawing inspiration from a different cuisine.

Some of the new ingredients on FoodChecker • Plantain • Za’atar • Borage • Quandong

FoodChecker makes menu planning easier

FoodChecker is an online tool for assessing food, drink, and recipes against relevant healthy eating guidelines.

For recipes made on site, you can enter your own recipe or use FoodChecker common recipe templates. Once you add your ingredients, FoodChecker can provide a classification and recommendations for healthier changes.

The tool is designed to make menu assessment practical and efficient. FoodChecker provides instant feedback as foods and drinks are added to an assessment, helping menu planners identify opportunities to make healthier changes without relying on time-consuming manual processes.

And with more than 10,000 branded products available in the database, FoodChecker can also help when you’re selecting packaged foods and drinks.

Making healthy eating more inclusive

Healthy eating is not about serving the same foods to everyone. Creating healthier food environments can also mean recognising the diverse cultures, preferences, and dietary needs of the communities you serve.

A wider ingredient database can support this by making it easier to find and assess ingredients that may be familiar and meaningful to different communities. When reviewing an established menu, it may be helpful to ask Who are we serving, and does our menu reflect the people who use our service?

You might discover an opportunity to introduce a new dish, adapt a favourite recipe, or offer a familiar ingredient in a new way.

Get creative with your next menu

The latest FoodChecker updates are an invitation to explore.

Next time you’re planning a menu, search the ingredient database and see what’s available. You may find an ingredient you haven’t used before or discover a new way to put a nutritious spin on a familiar recipe.

You can also explore the Healthy Eating Advisory Service free recipe library for inspiration. Recipes are assessed against relevant government healthy eating guidelines, helping take some of the guesswork out of menu planning.