My trip to Nestle: What this registered dietitian learned, ate & experienced at the Balance Your Plate with Frozen event 2017.
Disclosure: I was invited to attend an event by Nestlé at their facilities in Ohio. Nestlé sponsored my travel and lodging expenses. I was not compensated for my time. As always, all opinions are my own.
Earlier this month I was able to attend a special event put on by Nestlé at their facilities near Cleveland, Ohio. I was able to visit two of their buildings – their main office building, which includes their culinary kitchen, and their Research & Development (R&D) Center. Let me tell you, wow. Impressive, to say the least.
I was part of a group of less than 20 registered dietitian bloggers invited to learn more about Nestlé’s Balance Your Plate initiative. If you remember, last November I shared a simple roasted sweet potato coins recipe for a recipe contest put on by Nestlé to show how you can balance your plate with frozen. Needless to say, when I was invited to visit their facilities in Ohio I was pretty excited!
It was a fairly short trip – I was only there for about a day and a half. Day one we were introduced to Nestlé’s registered dietitians, some of their product development team, marketing team and their chefs. Of course, they welcomed us with delicious snacks. Everyone I met was so nice and genuine. You can tell they truly care about providing the best possible food to their consumers.
The first day we heard from one of the chefs about food trends and how they at Nestlé predict what is the next “up and coming” ingredient, food, or cooking technique. They study and visit different food cultures, cities, populations, and more to help guide them in figuring out what recipes and products they should be thinking about in the upcoming years.
Next was one of my favorite parts of the event, cooking with the Nestlé chefs in their beautiful kitchen!
We broke out into different teams, each focusing on a different cooking technique. My group cooked via sous vide. If you haven’t ever heard of sous vide before, it is a method of cooking in which food is vacuum-sealed in a plastic pouch and then placed in a water bath for longer than normal cooking times at a temperature lower than normally used for cooking. The purpose is to cook the food evenly and to retain moisture.
We made scallions – and they were SO good! As a girl who lives in a land-locked state and is still trying to like more seafood, I’ll tell you the buttery and meaty texture of the scallions was amazing.
Other groups made fresh pasta, brick oven pizzas, and stir fry. To end the delicious dinner we sampled Hagaan Daz new non-dairy ice cream flavors – and if they didn’t tell me I wouldn’t have even known they weren’t dairy free. I promise. They also had samples of Outshine’s new watermelon fruit bar as well as Skinny Cow’s new salt-kissed caramel Greek frozen yogurt bar. So much goodness in one room. I left amply stuffed.
The next morning, bright and early, a small group of us attended a class at Life Time Fitness. It was a boot camp style class and a lot of fun! I usually workout by myself, so I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group class environment. And, we were shown more Ohio hospitality as our class trainer bought us all post-workout smoothies! Again, so good. (Are you catching a theme here?)
After getting cleaned up we headed on over to Nestlé’s R&D Center. We started the morning with breakfast, which consisted of whole grain English muffins, avocados, oatmeal, yogurt, fresh fruit, nuts, and Nestlé Nesquick’s new lower sugar milk drinks. They made sure we were well fed! During breakfast we listened to a presentation on the different nutrition initiatives Nestlé has been working toward. These include cleaning up the ingredients lists (think simpler ingredients that you recognize), reducing sodium and fat in many of their products, using more non-GMO ingredients, offering gluten-free varieties in both frozen entrées and pizzas, and adding new products to meet demand for healthier frozen food options.
I was pleasantly surprised to see all they have done and are currently working on in terms of nutrition. Obviously taste is king when creating or tweaking a product, but nutrition ranks pretty high on the list, too. The people working in this area really do care about creating a healthier product for consumers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Ns7dwVjpA
After the presentation we toured their R&D facility. It was really neat to see everything from their “culinarium” where they have more chefs working on recipes, the dough and meals benchmark kitchens (getting a recipe from the chefs and retesting and tweaking it until it’s perfect and able to be made on a larger scale, to their pilot plant (making the BIG batches of food), the product packaging design room and team, to their consumer testing area (bringing in real people to try out the products), and even the professional test-taster stations (How cool would it be to be a professional taste tester?!). I loved seeing the “behind the scenes” view of how everything comes together to create a market-ready product.
Ready for the tour!
After the tour we listened to a more in-depth presentation about Nestlé’s initiative to create better products.
We then packed up and headed back to the main office building and culinary kitchen for lunch.
During lunch we learned more about the Balance Your Plate program, what they have done so far to promote it and what they are hoping to do with it. The main point of the Balance Your Plate program is to show that you can eat frozen entrées or pizza and still have a healthy diet. In a nut shell, Balance Your Plate with Nestlé helps consumers find unique ways to integrate more nutrition throughout the day, while managing portions and calorie intake.
We then ended our time at Nestlé with a social media training, which provided a lot of insight to us RDN bloggers! The gentleman they had do the training sure knew his stuff! Hopefully I’ll be able to take back at least one or two things to implement into my practice as a blogger.
Last, but not least, they sent us off in true Nestlé fashion: with a box of Nestlé Tollhouse Cookies baked by the Nestlé chefs themselves. And they tasted ah-mazing. Like I’ve said – the people who work at Nestlé are the nicest people! And by the way, I somehow managed to not eat all of the cookies and share with my family when I got home. Now I need to figure out how I can get more genuine Nestlé Tollhouse cookies delivered to my door…
Overall, I really enjoyed my time at Nestlé. They showed us how they are working to create higher quality, healthier frozen entrées and pizzas for us as consumers. Not all frozen foods are created the same. Nestlé takes pride in what they do and are always looking for ways to improve and meet consumer demands.
The sodium content is still on the high side in many of their frozen products, but I will say that they have reduced it A LOT from where it was been in the past. Updating recipes while maintaining flavor, taste and quality are not as simple as it sounds. There are a lot of factors to consider. That’s why Nestlé is promoting the Balance Your Plate Program. Frozen foods definitely can fit into a healthy, balanced diet. It doesn’t have to be all or none. Simply watch portion sizes and include a healthy side dish to go along! It’s that simple.
Tell me, how do YOU balance your plate with frozen? Let me know in the comments!
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