HEDEF PROGRAMLAMA TEKNİĞİ İLE MENÜ PLANLAMASI

Adequate and balanced nutrition is one of the most important issues which affect the capacity of employees in the branches of business where collective workforce is needed. Assuming that workers have at least one meal in the workplace, nutrition facts are very important for both workers and employers. The nutrition services in the workplace are examined as “bulk nutrition systems”. Those systems consider the whole process from providing to consuming foods that a worker needs in accordance with his or her age, sexuality and the level of difficulty the task performed. Menu management and menu inspection are at the core of this process. In the narrow sense, menu can be defined as the food list. In a broader sense, it includes the complex process of preparing the list of food to be given to the worker having regard to the needs of his or her in a bulk nutrition system. Therefore, menus are not determined randomly, a lot of factors are taken into account instead. While some of these factors should be met primarily and necessarily, some others help workers having adequate and satisfactory nutrition. Besides all, cost of the meal is again important for workers and employers too. Menu planning is a time consuming and costly activity since all of those factors are taken into consideration. Consequently, it will be very helpful to use mathematical models for shortening the process and reducing the cost. Planning has multi purposes. Among a lot of mathematical models, when there are many purposes, goal programming technique allows to handle them simultaneously and in order of their priority. Unwanted deviations from this set of target values are minimized in this technique. In this study, lunch menus for 15 days have been composed for the workers in a moderate activity required business, in the age group between 19 and 30 by using Goal Programming Technique. 179 kind of food from Turkish cuisine were used for this aim. First, frame menu was taken into consideration. Then, food list was formulated in accordance with the frame menu related to color, texture, consistency and the flavor of foods. 179 kind of food were placed under 3 main groups regarding to the frame menu which is used at programming. These are; First group meals: Big pieces meat dishes, small pieces meat dishes, vegetable dishes with meat, grain dishes with meat and dishes with eggs. Second group meals: Soups, rice, pastas, pasties, vegetable dishes without meat. Third group meals: fruits, salads and desserts. A good menu should include one meal from each group. Thus a target constraint was added to the model for each meal group. In addition to that, another target constrain was built to provide all three dishes to be compatible with their color, texture, consistency and the flavor. There are 34 structural constraints in the model in relation to these factors. Besides, some new constraints were also added to the model in order not to give similar or same foods in the same meal for each day of the week. 10 more target constraints are added to the model in addition to structure constraints. While first of them was displaying the cost of menus, others were indicating the amount of nutrition and energy a worker needs to take for a meal. So, these constraints included the amount of energy, protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin and vitamin C. Established model was repeatedly solved every day by using Lingo 8.0 program with integer goal programming model and 15-day menus were composed. Menus derived from solution of the mathematical model met the needs of all energy and nutrition components necessary for a worker. Furthermore, these menu lists complied with all necessary elements like color, flavor, consistency and compatibility. Concerning the cost terms, it is seen that menu lists mostly achieve the cost target. Performing of menu planning with a mathematical structure helps to save time and it prevents some mistakes resulting from manual programming. Moreover, it might be enabled to add a new dish to the menu and to change the characteristics of the mass just by changing the related parameters. For such organizations where bulk nutrition services given, menu planning with mathematical models make it possible to design menus less costly.