Recipe Development using Nutrium: A Nutritionist’s Point of View
This article was guest written by Emma Hanton, an Associate Registered Nutritionist and Freelance Nutrition Consultant working at Essentially Emma, a company founded by her that involves several activities, from recipe development and analysis to food photography and collaboration with brands.
We invited Emma Hanton to give our software a try and share her feedback about our recipe development feature. You can check her feedback about Nutrium on her Instagram.
In this article, Emma shares her 6 step process to create recipes for clients, as well as her top tips to develop delicious and nutritious recipes.
How do you develop recipes as a nutritionist?
Working as a nutritionist can involve many different tasks other than working with individuals. As a nutritionist, I regularly create recipes for clients and help them analyse the nutrition of their recipes and products to help optimise their nutritional profiles.
I also develop my own recipes for my blog to provide easy, healthy recipes to my followers and clients. Having the ability to easily and correctly analyse recipes is invaluable to me and my business as a nutritionist. Clients and consumers appreciate having balanced, refined recipes that meet their nutritional requirements.
What are the steps you take while creating recipes for clients?
As I do a lot of recipe development work for brands and clients, I have an established and simple process that I follow, which provides accurate (and delicious!) results.
- Brainstorm the recipe, looking at inspiration and ingredient ideas. This may involve considering different nutrients if I am creating a recipe with a specific goal in mind, eg. supporting immune health and incorporating vitamin C.
- Make the recipe, write down ingredients and instructions, and then test how it tastes.
- Input the ingredients and quantities into Nutrium. On the rare occasion I can’t find the ingredient, I can add a new food and input the data from the nutrition label on the packet.
- Input portion sizes
- Have a quick check of the nutrition content to make sure it is meeting the values I would like. If it does not, I can adjust the portion size or remake it and tweak the ingredients – back to step 2.
- If the basic nutrition is good,I will look through all of the data and then export the recipe and/or the data to send to clients."
What are some of your top tips for creating recipes?
Here are a few tips I have learned along the way to make recipe development smooth and efficient:
- Use the food database to plan recipes. If you are trying to make a high fiber recipe, you can research which ingredients are the highest in fiber before deciding to use them in your recipe.
- If you are developing a recipe for a specific nutrition brief, try creating the recipe in Nutrium first before actually cooking it. This way you can see whether it will meet your set criteria before taking the time to bake it. Then tweak it, bake it and analyse again if need be!
- Always make mini-batches of recipes you are testing so that if you need to remake it, you aren’t using-up loads of ingredients at a time. For example, I usually will only make 4-6 cookies.
- Pay the most attention to your nutrition results per portion and make sure your portions are accurate. For example, if you are trying to make a recipe to provide 100% of your daily vitamin C, make sure that amount is achieved with 1 portion of the recipe as that is what people will be eating! Nutrium provides the nutrient breakdown per portion and per 100g for easy referencing.
- When reformulating or adjusting recipes, make sure you are doing realistic adjustments that still taste good. Particularly with things like baking as there is a fine balance to getting things to bake properly. Testing is super important!
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Why do you use Nutrium - Nutrition software to create your recipes?
Overall, Nutrium is a fantastic tool for any nutrition business! Whether you are client or food-focused, it has essential tools to ensure you are doing your work accurately and efficiently which is really important! It keeps me organised and has made my workflow much simpler. Aside from the recipe development, you can completely manage and interact with your clients.
From the software you can schedule appointments, request and receive payments for services, keep medical histories and appointment notes and create bespoke meal plans and goals for your clients.
It also has an app for your clients to use to check in which is really helpful to motivate them to reach their goals! As it is all in one platform it also means that recipes created can easily be incorporated into clients’ plans which makes meal planning super easy.
On the recipe side, Nutrium is connected with multiple food and nutrition databases which means there is a broad range of ingredient data for your recipes. You can select which database you want to use (McCance and Widdowson is commonly used in the UK) or you can search all of them which is useful for less common ingredients.
While adding the ingredients, there are multiple units and common measures to choose from and you can also change the label of the food if you would like it to read differently. Once you have finished creating the recipe it will be fully analysed, giving you the basic nutrition breakdown such as calories, fat, carbohydrates and protein per portion, per 100g and as a daily reference intake percentage.
It also offers advanced analysis of all vitamins and minerals per portion. This makes it easy to tweak recipes to enhance their nutrition, look for potential nutrition and health claims and double-check that the recipe is balanced overall. Finally, you can export or print the recipes in a branded format to send to clients.
Now that you have the best tips by Emma to create amazing recipes for your nutrition clients it is time to put them into practice!
If you haven't already, make sure to enjoy our 14-day free trial and explore all the features that will make your work much easier.
