Circular 7/2026: Abu Dhabi’s Healthy-Menu Rule — What SEHHI Classification Requires, Who Assesses It, and How to Comply Before 1 October

On 1 October 2026 the grace period ends. From that date, DCT Abu Dhabi’s Circular 7/2026 requires every hotel-operated and independent food and beverage outlet holding a tourism licence in the emirate to carry SEHHI-classified healthy options across the adult menu and on at least half of the children’s menu — and to mark them with the SEHHI logo. A second policy makes low-sodium salt the default salt on the table. The policies took effect on 1 July with a three-month implementation window; enforcement begins in October.

This piece is the operator’s walk through the rule: what it asks for, who actually decides whether a dish qualifies, how the assessment works, why the emirate is doing it, and how to comply in a way that leaves the menu stronger rather than weaker. It is not legal or licensing advice — requirements change, and the position for your own outlet should be confirmed with DCT Abu Dhabi and the Abu Dhabi Public Health Centre directly. It is an honest account of the work, from people who have re-engineered menus under new constraints across 300+ project engagements.

What the circular requires

Four things, as reported by the authority and the press that covered it:

1. Adult menus must carry at least one healthy option in every menu category — appetisers, main courses, side dishes and desserts. One healthy main does not satisfy the rule if the dessert list has nothing.
2. Children’s menus must be at least 50 per cent healthy options, and the authority explicitly allows suitable adult dishes adapted into smaller, child-friendly portions.
3. Identification is by the SEHHI logo on the menu itself, so a guest can find the qualifying dishes without asking.
4. Low-sodium salt becomes the default table option in place of standard salt, under a companion policy aimed at reducing sodium intake.

The scope, as reported, is outlets under a DCT Abu Dhabi tourism licence: hotel restaurants, hotel-operated outlets and independent licensed venues. If you hold a different licence, the honest answer is to ask rather than assume; the SEHHI programme itself has been open to restaurants, cafés, hotels, healthcare facilities and grocers since ADPHC launched it in 2022.

Who assesses a dish — and why that matters

This is the part operators get wrong first. The assessment of whether a dish meets the SEHHI classification sits with the Abu Dhabi Public Health Centre, the body that developed the classification. DCT Abu Dhabi is the licensing authority that requires the healthy options and may ask an outlet to submit its menus to verify compliance; ADPHC is the body that handles the recipe and nutritional assessment where applicable.

The consequence is simple: an operator does not self-declare a dish “healthy”. The operator prepares the recipe, the quantities and the nutritional information, submits them through ADPHC’s programme, and the classification is the centre’s verdict. A menu that says SEHHI next to a dish nobody assessed is not a compliant menu; it is a claim.

What the classification reads

ADPHC describes SEHHI as identifying food items that are lower in fat, sugar and salt and higher in nutritional value, with the classification process considering calorie count, total fats, saturated and trans fats, sugar, salt and fibre. The centre’s published material does not set out the numeric cut-offs for each line; the working thresholds come through the programme itself, and the centre has said participating outlets enter their food items into a digitised platform that reviews and analyses the nutritional value of the dishes, supported by guidance and training.

The practical reading for a kitchen is this: build every candidate recipe so it can answer all six lines with real figures — grams per portion, not “a splash” — because a recipe that cannot state its own numbers cannot be assessed, whatever its intentions.

Why Abu Dhabi is doing this

The emirate has been moving in one direction for years. SEHHI grew out of the earlier Weqaya programme; its three sub-programmes — healthy-menu labelling, calorie display and healthy groceries — were designed to make the healthier choice the visible one across the places people actually eat. The 2026 circular is that direction arriving at the tourism sector with a date on it: a visitor in an Abu Dhabi hotel should be able to find a healthy option in every course, a child’s menu should not be half fried, and the salt on the table should be the lower-sodium kind by default.

For an operator, the reason to take it seriously goes beyond the inspection. The healthy line on a menu is increasingly the line a growing share of guests look for first — business travellers, families, the guest managing a condition — and a hotel restaurant that treats the rule as a compliance chore will lose those covers to one that treats it as a product.

How to comply — the operator’s sequence

The work has a natural order. Done in this order it takes weeks; done in the wrong order it takes months and produces a menu nobody is proud of.

Step 1 · Audit the menu against the four rules

Take the current adult menu and mark each category: is there a dish that could plausibly qualify? Then the children’s menu: count the items, and count the ones that could qualify. The gaps define the recipe development you need. Most menus we see have one or two candidates in mains and nothing credible in desserts or sides.

Step 2 · Standardise the candidate recipes to the gram

A SEHHI submission needs the recipe as an engineering document: ingredients by weight per portion, cooking method (because fat absorbed in frying is part of the number), and the finished portion size. This is the same discipline a costed menu needs, so the operators who already run recipe cards with yields and portion weights are most of the way there. The ones who cook from memory have the real work ahead of them — and it is work that pays back in food cost long after the circular.

Step 3 · Get the nutritional figures from a qualified source

Nutritional analysis is a professional task: a qualified dietitian or nutrition professional, or laboratory analysis where a recipe warrants it. Calculation from recipe databases can serve the first pass, but the figure you submit should be one a professional stands behind. GGB coordinates this step; it does not replace the professional.

Step 4 · Submit through the programme and let ADPHC assess

Enter the dishes into ADPHC’s platform with their recipes and nutritional information, follow the centre’s guidance, and treat the classification as the centre’s decision. Keep the submission record and the classified list with the menu file, because DCT Abu Dhabi may ask to see the menus.

Step 5 · Design the menu, not just the label

This is where a compliance exercise becomes a commercial one. Place the SEHHI items inside the menu engineering matrix: cost them, price them, position them. A healthy dish designed from lower-fat, lower-sugar components often carries a lower ingredient cost than the dish beside it; priced with confidence and placed where the eye lands, it becomes a star rather than a dog. The children’s menu deserves the same care — a smaller portion of a well-made adult dish is both the authority’s suggestion and, usually, the better product.

Step 6 · Train, then switch the salt

Service teams need to know which dishes carry the logo and why, and the kitchen needs to hold the standardised recipe exactly — a SEHHI classification is only as true as the plate that goes out. The low-sodium salt change is the simplest line in the circular and the easiest to forget on the table.

Where GGB fits — and where it stops

Menu re-engineering under a new constraint is the work we do most often. Across 300+ project engagements and 45+ concepts developed and launched, the pattern of this job is familiar: an audit of the menu against the rule, recipe standardisation to the gram, costing every candidate, coordinating the nutritional analysis with qualified professionals, preparing the submission file, redesigning the menu so the compliant items also earn their place, and training the team so the plate matches the paper. It is the same discipline that turns a loose kitchen into a controlled one; the circular is simply a deadline for doing it.

What GGB does not do is decide classification. That sits with ADPHC. Nor does GGB replace the dietitian, the food-safety authority or your legal adviser. The menu engineering matrix — with its menu reader, which fills the form from a photograph of the page — is the free place to start: it shows, in your own figures, which dishes earn their space and where a SEHHI item can be placed without apology. When the menu needs the full treatment before October, start a project and say “Circular 7/2026”; the first conversation is the audit in step 1.

The deadline, honestly

Between now and 1 October there is time to do this properly for a menu with a handful of gaps, and just enough time for a menu with many. Recipe standardisation and nutritional analysis are the long poles; menu design and training follow quickly once the numbers exist. Start with the audit this week, and treat every step as something the menu should have had anyway.