Three Reasons You Want Healthy Snacks Waiting For Your Mine Workers Each Day

9 February 2016

Alexa Morales

If you manage a mining operation, particularly one that's in a remote location, you know that getting enough food for your workers can be difficult. Many mining companies and supply stores offer catering and lunch box services to ensure workers have access to good meals. But don't forget the snacks. It's easy to think that snacks are not going to have a big impact on a worker's nutrition, but that's not the case -- snacks play a huge role in daily health, and having healthy snacks like fresh fruit, lean meats and cheeses, nuts, whole-grain foods, and so on is crucial. Here are three reasons why having healthy snacks goes a long way toward keeping your workforce productive and happy.

Provide Adequate Energy and Avoid Health Problems

Resource Engineering & Maintenance, a Canadian website, notes that poor nutrition among mine workers contributes to fatigue (and an increased risk of accidents as a result), absenteeism, and poor coordination. Poor nutrition now can also lead to an increased risk for chronic health problems later on in life. By ensuring that workers can get nutritious snacks on their breaks instead of heading for potato chips in a nearby vending machine, for example, you can reduce the chances of something going wrong at the mine and of workers developing problems like heart disease later in life.

Keep Morale up and Reduces Chances of Turnover

Good nutrition and tasty food help keep workers happier. If the food is drab and not providing enough nutrition to stay healthy, workers can become listless and uninterested in what they're doing. Add housing stress on top of this -- often a problem at remote mining sites -- and people can quit work much earlier and much more frequently than is helpful for the company. After several hours in a dark, dirty mine, being able to take a break and eat fresh, juicy fruit, crunchy nuts and seeds, and chewy lean dried meats, for example, can be a very welcome break that refreshes the workers.

Combat Less Healthy Meal Options

Many catering services provide healthy food at mealtimes, but they also provide some not-so-healthy food for the comfort factor. Comfort food can be an important part of morale-upkeep at a remote mining site, but it's too easy for workers to always choose the comfort food options when they get meals. By providing healthy snacks for your workers when they take short breaks during the workday, you can combat those less healthy meal options and ensure that your workers are getting some sort of nutrition. A worker who might not normally choose fruit during a meal may choose an apple and cheese for a snack if that's the only type of food available, for example.

With caloric intake so important for miners, who can burn more than 4,000 calories per day (per a white paper written for Target Logistics), snacks become an excellent way to sneak in nutrition while enabling workers to keep up energy levels during work. If you'd like to see the array of snacks available, talk to mining supply companies and stores, like Sps Mining Supplies mining supplies.

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