Being the father of two young daughters and an executive with Destination Hotels & Resorts, Mark Hickey has traveled enough to know the standard items on a children’s menu: chicken fingers, hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza and macaroni and cheese.

The senior vice president of operations for the management company wasn’t happy with the choices and helped create a healthy and fun menu for his company’s full-service properties. The Kids Café healthy menu selections debuted in June at many of Destination’s 34 properties after a unique Iron Chef-inspired contest to create the items.

“Before I was a daddy, it probably didn’t resonate as hard as it does now,” says Hickey, whose daughters Lauren, 7, and Alexa, 5, helped inspire the new menu. Hickey became more concerned reading about recent reports of increased childhood obesity rates.

Mark Hickey with his daughters Lauren, left, and Alexa.

“We had the opportunity and responsibility as a company to be able to put forth an effort that would resonate with some of our customers,” he says. “Menus all look the exact same. You’re barraged with that. But there is a choice...

“We knew we had to come up with a way to penetrate the hearts and minds of our executive chefs and food & beverage directors.”

His idea was to create an Iron Chef cooking contest to come up with the new menu, although the contestants didn’t know exactly what they were walking into. At The Inverness Hotel and Conference Center in Denver, at a corporate meeting in May, seven teams of five chefs and f&b directors came dressed in whites ready to create, so they thought, wonderful gourmet meals with exotic and secret ingredients.

They were led into a room and the doors opened to reveal the judges: five children, the sons and daughters of company executives, dressed in chef whites and wearing baseball caps, holding paddles with ratings from “delicious” to “icky” written on them.

The chefs’ assignments were to use the provided healthy ingredients to prepare two creative breakfast items, two all-day items, a dessert and beverage for the scowling judges, in one hour. “They had to name it, cost it, tell its story and it darn well better appeal to guests,” Hickey said. “And no deep fryer.”

The “delicious” items—like Squidword Fish Sticks, Multi-Grain Pizza Twists, Veggie Sliders, Build Your Own Fruit Taco, Melon Fries with Strawberry Ketchup or the Playground Boost beverage—are now being offered at most of DH&R’s full-service properties as part of the Kids Café menu.

Hickey says the items are similarly priced to the more traditional kids’ menu items, which properties are still allowed to offer, and aren’t more costly or labor intensive to prepare.

“Parents that want the offerings of pizza and French fries can have that,” he says. “We’re not outlawing those things, just offering another option for our customers and culinary teams to be able to offer young adults more healthy choices.”

As a parent, Hickey knows how important making a son or daughter happy can be. And as a hotel executive, he knows what that can also mean for business.

“I think it all goes to providing a memorable guest experience,” Hickey says. “Having two young daughters, where we go is greatly influenced and sometimes dictated by what makes our girls happy.”