Operations Management: An Integrated Approach, 5th Edition

CASE: Diet Planning

Given your busy schedule, you eat many meals on the go. Lately, you've started to get concerned about the nutritional value of all those burger and fries lunches. You decide to build a model to help you decide ahead of time on a reasonably nutritious diet for a single day at your favorite restaurant.

A number of restaurants (e.g., Burger King, McDonald's, Wendy's) have nutritional data for their menu items available on the Web. In some cases these are essentially electronic versions of their printed nutritional brochures; in other cases they are in a form that you can copy and paste into an Excel spreadsheet. Explore the Web sites of several different restaurants to find available data. Choose a single restaurant for this case. Alternatively, you can use foods that you might prepare at home. The U.S. Department of Agriculture maintains a Web site containing documents that list the nutritional value of foods. See http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/.

(a) You want to construct a model so that you can enter the number of each menu item you would choose to consume in one day (e.g., 1 egg and sausage sandwich, 2 cheeseburgers, 3 chocolate shakes), and have the model automatically calculate the total nutritional statistics for that particular choice of items. You will then be able to use the model to adjust your food and drink choices to help plan a more nutritious diet.

(b) Choose a number of menu items as possible breakfast, lunch, and dinner items from the data ...