Enabling and configuring the collection of dietary preferences

The collection of dietary preferences for catering at face-to-face courses.

Super Administrator

Written By Donna Hanson-Squires (Super Administrator)

Updated at March 3rd, 2025

Face-to-face programs (blended programs with face-to-face components) often serve lunch and/or snacks, so information about participants' dietary preferences is needed.

There are several steps and settings involved in setting up this feature.

 

Step 1: Enable and configure the dietary preference profile fields

Academy’s User Profile includes specific fields designed to collect dietary information. The fields are:

Menu Type Preference

Used to collect information about the participant’s overall diet. For example, vegetarian or vegan.

Allergies and Restrictions

Used to collect information on specific dietary restrictions. For example, a peanut allergy or a gluten intolerance.

Other Comments

A free text field that can be enabled to collect any other relevant information not captured by the menu preference or restrictions.

 

To enable the fields:

  • Go to Platform Settings > User Profile
  • Enable the dietary profile fields by adding them from the disabled fields list
  • Edit the fields to set your preferred drop-down options for the Menu Type Preference and Allergies and Restrictions fields. We recommend keeping these fields optional for the participants.
The screenshot shows the user profile fields available within the user-profile sub-heading of the platform settings menu. The page is divided by a few subsections - Mandatory Fields, Sortable Fields, Special Fields and Disabled Fields. There is three items in the 'Special Fields' list highlighted: Menu Type Preferenes, Allergies and Restrictions', and Other Comments. These have been selected from the Disabled Fields list and added to Special Fields. On each of those list items there is an 'Edit' button where changes can be made to the field properties.

 

Step 2: Enable the dietary section in the Program Onboarding and the dietary report

For any program where you need to collect dietary information, you will need to enable:

  • The Program Onboarding screen for collecting dietary information from participants. It will look like this:
     
This screen shows the user is editing the onboarding experience within a course admin. The 'dietaries' section of onboarding is toggled on, and there is a section for free text where the user can add instructions for the learner when completing the dietary forms.

 

  • You will also need to enable the Dietary Report in Program Settings. This will enable a special report in the Program Dashboards. The report can be exported to Word or PDF (for sending to caterers).
This short video shows the user in facilitator view of a course has navigated to the 'dashboards' sub-heading in the left menu. From here, the last report, titled 'Dietary Requirements', is selected. Once opened, the report details the learners in the program and their selected dietary requirements. In the top right corner of the window, there are two buttons for "export to PDF" and "export to Word".
 

 

Step 3: Edit participants' dietary preferences on their behalf

If a participant contacts you directly to discuss their dietary requirements, Program Coordinators can edit a learner's preferences via their profile in the Class List.
 

In a learners' pop-up profile window, the 'profile' sub-heading is selected, and the 'dietaries' tab. From here, the menu for the learner's dietaries is visible for the admin user to make changes as required.