Western Europeans eat nearly every day food produced by public catering units. Recommended nutrient based standards exist for the nutritional quality of this catered food. But the production units are under no obligation to do any regulatory control. Very few studies have been done on public catering units. This led to my research on the nutrient based quality control performed by the public catering units in Finland, France and Germany. The results of this research appear to demonstrate a need to promote quality control through a development of more applicable standards and control methods. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.