If you develop menus and want to be sure they are nutritionally adequate, e.g. school meals, hospital menus, care home menus, WISP has a range of essential features for this purpose.You can build menus either from recipes, individual foods or a combination of these.

You can enter and analyse recipes. This is important because the recipes you are using may not be the same as those of others. Recipes may change, affecting their nutrient composition. Ingredient suppliers may change. One cannot assume that an ingredient purchased from another supplier will have the same nutrient composition. Thus, change of an ingredient supplier may affect the nutrient composition of that ingredient and hence any recipes and menus that use it.

Click here for details of recipe analysis with WISP. You can reanalyse all recipes within WISP at the touch of a button. This process usually takes only a few seconds.

For menus, WISP enables you to:
• Examine whether a menu itself complies with foods legislation, e.g. school meals
• Analyse the nutrient composition of menus, including non-milk extrinsic sugars
• Develop menus for a special diet, e.g. milk free, egg free, vegetarian
• Compare menu nutrient composition with legislation or other nutritional standards, where appropriate
  Thus, you can see whether a menu is likely to meet the nutritional standards BEFORE you spend a great deal of money on implementing the menu.
• Examine the nutrient composition of what is served from a menu. Thus, AFTER implementing your menu, you can assess whether, in practice, it still complies with the nutritional standards.
• Calculate the cost of a menu, if you have cost data for each ingredient used

WISP contains the latest legislation for school meals (England & Scotland) and also contains nutritional guidelines for day and meal intakes for other age groups. WISP also contains nutrition standards for hospital menus (Scotland).

You can analyse the whole menu cycle or any part of it. Analysis is performed to sound mathematical principles and is very fast, WISP carrying out 70 million nutrient calculations in one minute! (For comparison, doing this by hand would take one person about 70 years!).

Where a menu does not comply with the nutritional standards, WISP has a help system to assist you in deciding what changes to make to the menu. You can also contact our experienced nutritionists at any time (office hrs), who will be pleased to help.

Hospital caterers may also find Tinuviel Software's Integrated Catering System (ICS) of interest.

For full details on the WISP program, click here.