Vegetable content & variety of convenience cooking product recipes: an online audit of Australian supermarket products

ABSTARCT

Meal/recipe bases are low-cost and popular convenience cooking products, requiring limited preparation time and cooking skills. Back-of-pack recipes provided on these products could help encourage vegetable consumption; however, the vegetable content of these recipes has not been examined. Therefore, an audit was conducted of recipes provided on recipe/meal bases (n = 91) sold online at two Australian supermarkets. Recipes included 1.58 standard serves of vegetables per suggested serving on average, with 75% of recipes providing <2 standard serves of vegetables, and recipes had low vegetable variety. Beef-based recipes had more standard serves of vegetables per standard serving than those based on chicken (p = 0.02). 45% of products had recipes taking <25 minutes. These results provide new insights into the vegetable content of recipes provided on meal and recipe bases and how these recipes could be adjusted to increase vegetable intakes. Results serve as a baseline to track future improvements in these recipes.

Keywords:

• Meal base
• recipe base
• vegetable serves
• casserole base
• back-of-pack

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The raw data used to produce this paper can be accessed at doi: 10.17632/x76yrcf5g2.1

Additional information

Funding

No funding was obtained for the completion of this research. E.L.B and T.B have previously received funding from Mars Foods Australia. Mars Foods Australia played no role in the present study. T.B has previously received funding from Nestle. Nestle played no role in the present study.