“Beyond the Tray” is a living process developed by ACS to design, prepare, and serve food in correctional facilities that ensures every meal meets your requirements every day. Everything hinges on Meal Acceptance and Consumption. Here’s how it works:

Menus designed by our dietitians are immediately communicated to Food Supply for fulfillment, to Operations for execution, and to Management for audits. PRIMA™, our proprietary Windows-based software, ties these critical functions together. Feedback from our PRIMA™ communication platform is fed back to Menu Design for adjustments.

Operational Excellence (OP-X™) is ARAMARK’s proprietary production system. While some offer Quality Assurance programs, OP-X™ starts with ACA standards and adds strict protocols to protect you from litigation. OP-X™ is a

• Training Tool
• Documentation Tool
• Compliance Help Tool
• Quality Assurance Tool

The Corrections industry’s largest team of registered dietitians goes to work for you. Once your needs are understood, the dietitians take into account nutritional standards, caloric intake requirements, food portions, recipe taste, meal variety, and costs to produce a menu that promotes good offender behavior.

Menus are forwarded to Supply Chain for accurate, cost-effective sourcing. ARAMARK purchases more than $4 billion of food products making us one of the largest buyers in the nation. Our buying power goes to work for you resulting in safe, high-quality products at competitive prices.

A great menu and supply plan needs equal focus on execution at your site. We combine our Operational Excellence (OP-X™) proprietary production system with extensive training for ARAMARK employees called STARS (Selection, Training, Reward and Retention) and offender management training called HOME (Handling Offender Manipulation Effectively). This approach ensures that all requirements are met, and that meals are delivered as expected and on time.

Systems and procedures are only as good as the compliance protocols, and oversight is the key to earning and keeping accreditation status. Using PRIMA™ data and input from health inspections and accreditation audits by the ACA and AJA, our District Managers, Regional Management, Registered Dieticians and Finance Teams inspect your operation.

To achieve the goal of Meal Acceptance we must have feedback. We conduct regular surveys with offenders, Correctional Officers and Client administration. Our Menu Design team combines the survey results with PRIMA™ data and external audit reports to improve our recipes and menus.

Download our Beyond the Tray brochure.