Edamam, a company that provides automated nutrition analysis solutions, announced a partnership with the United States Healthful Food Council (USHFC). Under the agreement, all USHFC REAL Certified and REAL25 restaurants will receive one year of free access to Edamam’s Nutrition Wizard. Restaurants wishing to utilize the USHFC’s “White Glove” nutrition service from a REAL credentialed Registered Dietitian will be able to do so at a reduced price.

Edamam’s real-time nutrition analysis service leverages proprietary natural language processing, information extraction and post-processing algorithms to append highly accurate nutrition data and diet tags to any recipe or ingredient list.

“By offering our service for free to each REAL Certified restaurant, we can help spark a change in attitude towards publishing nutrition data and highlighting the ease of doing so and the resulting benefit to diners and their health,” comments Victor Penev, Edamam’s founder and CEO.

To become REAL Certified, restaurants must satisfy prerequisites and earn sufficient points in the areas of Responsible (nutrition), Epicurean (preparation), Agricultural (sourcing), and Leadership (going above and beyond). Though menu labeling is not currently a requirement for REAL certification, it may be recognized in a future standard.

“The goal of REAL is to increase access to healthful and sustainable food, and transparency is a critical ingredient, especially in restaurants,” adds Lawrence Williams, CEO of the USHFC. “The FDA recently finalized the menu labeling rules, providing one year for compliance, and we would like to do whatever we can to decrease the financial burden on the industry.”