Food allergies nothing to sneeze at for Fort Collins’ MenuTrinfo

FORT COLLINS — Betsy Craig, considered one of the nation’s leading experts on food allergies, wishes the scientists researching them would put her out of business.

“I’m not smarter than the experts, that’s for darned sure,” said Craig, co-founder and chief executive of MenuTrinfo LLC, which helps food-service operators protect lives and health. “There’s so many doctors and researchers, a lot of nonprofits that are raising funds for all the research. I wish they’d put me out of business and discover a cure so people are safe when they eat food,” she said. “Food is supposed to be love. Food is how we express love in this country. We share food, it’s very intimate. Unfortunately in some cases food can kill. So if they could find a cure, I could retire comfortably. I’m ready to go, but it’s not ready to have me go anytime soon.”

Since its founding in February 2010, MenuTrinfo — its name combines menu, nutrition and information — has spawned AllerTrain, a suite of food-allergen and gluten-free food-safety training services, and Kitchens with Confidence, which helps manufactures and commercial kitchens be certified as free from one or all eight major food allergens and/or glutens.

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“My mission is really simple,” she said. “MenuTrinfo exists to inform food service what to safely serve their diners, whether it’s in a bottle, on a plate, in a dining hall, in a grocery store, in a restaurant. We do nutrition, we do training, and we do identifying foods that are free from allergens. We started out just wanting to do numbers, wanting to do calories, and it has morphed and pivoted into allergy training. We’re leading the country in that. It’s what we live for. It’s our passion.

“I do a lot of public speaking to promote our business, and on food allergies and food safety,” she said. “We’ve been leading the charge in this country. We’ve probably trained well over 1,500 colleges. We’ve trained hundreds of restaurants, plus do nutrition for another 150 restaurant brands that you would recognize driving up and down the street. We do their numbers for calories, but then most of them, we also do their allergen charts and we help them manage allergies. And now we’ve just broken into this whole world of, ‘Is this peanut free and how do we guarantee it to the consumer?’

“It’s about saving lives. It just comes down to those two words for us in every way, whether you have diabetes and you need to pay attention to carbs and sugars, or a heart condition, or you need to know where the allergens are.”

The idea for MenuTrinfo was born after Craig’s own life was on the line.

As described in her 2018 book “Unstoppable: A Recipe for Success in Life and Business,” Craig’s devotion to health began after emerging from drug and alcohol addiction and then nearly two decades later beating the odds against the rare autoimmune disorder scleroderma after doctors had told her she had about 18 months to live.

Between her own health issues, a nation’s economy slowly emerging from the Great Recession and the launching of the Affordable Care Act, the pieces fell together. Section 4205 of the enabling law for Obamacare mandated that restaurants with 20 or more locations put calorie counts on their menu items.

The company “started off of a Facebook idea,” she said. “Somebody said, ‘Menu labeling’s coming for restaurants, Betsy. You might want to look into that. Maybe Rocky, your husband, can build it.’ And literally three days later we began.

“We realized with our software that was being built by my husband that he could identify allergens within a recipe. So when he starts putting meatballs and pasta into a database to figure out the calories, all of a sudden he’s like, ‘Heck, we can show that there’s dairy in here, or there’s peanuts, whatever,’ and I was like. ‘I think allergies are becoming more of a big deal.’”

They were indeed. Only about 15 million Americans were considered to have some sort of food allergy in 2011, she said, but that number had burgeoned to more than 32 million by 2019.

“Nobody has a definite idea why it doubled in a period of eight years,” Craig said. “There’s people who believe it’s how we’re growing our food, there’s people who believe it has to do with how clean we are — we stopped being kids outside eating dirt and started playing on Nintendos. There’s a theory about when we introduced peanut protein in kids’ diets. So there’s a bunch of theories, but there is no ‘This is the reason.’ So food service is sitting there going, ‘How do we manage?’ I’ve been in food service since 1979. We never had anybody we worried about with food allergies. It just wasn’t a thing. But I assure you today it’s a thing.

“There wasn’t anybody doing what we set out to do, which was build the software, do it as a service, and maintain the integrity of those numbers ongoing for these brands,” she said. “The impact of food allergies has been massive in the food-service industry, and we just happened to have the right idea at the right time and set up before everybody knew they needed it. I just thought, if not now when and if not me who, and so here we are.”

She’s been able to tap registered dietitians from the University of Northern Colorado as well as food-safety and food-science interns from Colorado State University. “I always joke that I’m not one but I know how to hire them,” she said. “I’m blessed that they’re passionate about saving lives just like I am.”

Her clients include food-service concerns from Marriott hotels and Amtrak dining cars to college dining halls and restaurant chains such as Firehouse Subs, Which Wich, First Watch and Cheba Hut.

“We work with whoever it is who develops the recipes,” she said. “If you’re a brand, maybe you have an executive chef overseeing the brand. Or let’s say you’re the owner and you built it from your family recipes. We work with whoever that point person is on what the recipes are under a non-disclosure agreement for us because that’s your intellectual property. Then we find out where you’re buying your food — whether it’s a Sysco house or U.S. Foods or any of the big distributors; as a commercial restaurant you have to buy it from a commercial supplier. So then from there we put those recipes and sub-recipes into our database, and out comes the first round of preliminary numbers. We share those numbers with you” — the calories, sugars, carbohydrates, sodium and more — “and once you’re done with your sticker shock, we help you make it better and healthier without changing your family recipes. It’s interesting to watch people’s reaction, and ultimately you can provide food that’s safer and better for people to eat,”

MenoTrinfo’s sales fell 36 percent almost overnight and its staff fell to seven during the height of the pandemic because more than 74 percent of its restaurant, hotel and college clients closed at least temporarily. With the help of Payroll Protection Program funds, she said, “we tried to keep everyone on staff. We had a five-week layoff and then brought people back, but we didn’t replace people when some of them left.”

Her staff size now has tripled to 21, she said.

“I like being an employer of choice for people,” Craig said. “I want to keep growing at the rate we’re growing now, or a little bit quicker. Some people say, ‘I want to grow four times and then sell. I’m not there. I just want to keep doing what we get to do.

“I think there’s a purpose to us. I think we’re meant to be here.”