Managing dietary requirements has become more complex over recent years with medical, religious and lifestyle dietary requirements being received from an increasing number of attendees.

Event planners must take particular care recording and safeguarding data about dietary requirements:

- While some are simply preferences, in other cases food allergies can be life-threatening.

- Under data protection regulations, dietary requirements are considered 'special category personal data' since they may indicate a person's religion (and therefore ethnicity) or health status.

This topic covers the tools available in EventsAir for managing dietary requirements. You can create a standardized library of dietary requirements, select which of these are available for specific events, record attendee's requests during registration, and share the information securely with caterers and venues.

The Dietary Requirements Library (found in Application Settings) is where you can set up your standard list of dietary requirements for all your events. (The library can only be accessed by Administrators.)

Then for each event, you can go into the Set Up panel and under Contact, select all or just some of the options from your Dietary Requirements Library for that event.

To get the most out of these tools, you'll want to also enable the Catering Count option for each Registration Type (under Set Up panel, Registrations). This will make it easy to report to your caterers and venues how many special meals will be needed each day.

We'll demonstrate how in the video below:

To allow your attendees to select one or more dietary preferences when they register, add the "Dietary Preferences" element under the Contact module when building your registration site. (It's in the Contact module because you want the information to be stored with other personal details for that attendee.) You can even include an “Other” field, where attendees can type in a dietary option you haven't already listed.

Let's take a look at how to set up these tools in the video below:

Most times, you'll want to confirm with your attendees what you've recorded as their dietary requirements. You can do this by adding a Dietary Requirements Details component to the Confirmation Merge Doc.

There are four reports that will help you manage catering and dietary preferences:

You can filter these reports based on specific dietary requirements, and/or based on just the most recent updates (remember, these filters are under Contact).

To learn more about using these features, watch the video below:

The Dietary Requirements Portal enables venues and caterers to access real-time dietary requirement data from EventsAir. Access is shared via authorized email access, which helps keep this extremely sensitive information secure. Caterers and venues can see at a glance how many people there are in each dietary requirement category:

- For the whole event (for example, so they can prepare an appropriate selection of foods for people to choose from at a morning/afternoon coffee break)
- For specific functions such as a Gala Dinner, in which case the names and table numbers are required (so that the correct individual meals can be prepared and served).

If you've included an 'Other' option, these responses will also be visible in the Dietary Requirements Portal. The Export option can create a single Excel spreadsheet with all dietary requirement information. All data can be filtered by the “Dietary Requirements Last Updated” field.
To see the Dietary Requirements Portal in action, watch the video below:

Congratulations on completing this In Depth/Advanced topic about Dietary Requirements.

We've looked at:
- Creating the settings needed in your application and your event

- Capturing dietary requirements for attendees and guests on your registration site

- Confirming and reporting on dietary requirements

- Making use of the Dietary Requirements Portal to help your caterers and venues