Aramark’s Commitment to Health and Wellness

As part of our mission to enrich and nourish lives, we’ve taken a leadership position in health and wellness through our groundbreaking commitment with the American Heart Association (AHA) to help improve the Health of Americans 20 percent by 2020. 

One of the ways we are making a difference is by increasing the vegetables, fruits and whole grains by 20 percent in the two billion meals we serve annually, while reducing calories, saturated fat and sodium levels by 20 percent. No other food service company in our space has a commitment like this, and our focus starts at the top with our CEO.

As part of the effort, earlier this year we launched a public awareness campaign called Feed Your Potential 365, to drive behavior change in underserved communities, as well as with our consumers, clients, employees and the public at large.

So far, we are making good progress against our goals with the AHA, and in 2016 we reduced calories, saturated fat and sodium by 8% on menus we’re serving to millions of people in workplaces, hospitals and colleges & universities. 

As consumer demand for plant forward menus grows, we continue to provide choices to support those preferences.

• More than 10 percent of our menus currently have whole grains as the main ingredient and 30 percent of our main dishes are vegan or vegetarian. 
• We've introduced robust and complete vegan options for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. These 100 percent vegan menus omit all animal products and showcase innovative plant forward options.
• And recently, we announced a partnership with the Humane Society of the U.S. and the Culinary Institute of America around plant-forward culinary training.

It is important to understand the full story, because an activist connected to animal rights groups has initiated a viral campaign against Aramark to pressure the company into removing or greatly reducing the amount of meat we serve. 

Audrey Sanchez, the proprietor of a non-profit called Balanced, reached out to us earlier this summer. We spoke with her at length and offered to meet to further discuss her plant-based agenda. Instead, she followed the playbook of animal rights groups, and launched an unfounded, blatantly false campaign against Aramark and has threatened to extend it to our clients and consumers.

The truth is, Balanced is an activist initiative that has only been organized for a few months and not a credible organization that Aramark would partner with to advance its health and wellness goals. This has been proven by the fact that Balanced claimed that they were aligned with the American Heart Association when they launched this campaign against us. This was totally false, the AHA had to take action to have their name and logo removed from the Balanced website and does not agree with the ideas Balanced is promoting. (see more below)

Aramark will not be making a commitment with Balanced to reduce the amount of meat that we serve. We believe that our consumers set the table and we make sure that healthy and meatless choices are available to our clients and consumers, as well as meat-based options that also play a role in a healthy diet according to medical experts including the AHA.