Away-from-home meals: an integral part of Malaysia's food environment.

Away-from-home meals have become an increasingly common part of the Malaysian diet, with the wide availability of hawker stalls, coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, and food delivery services catering to diverse tastes and budgets. This paper provides a narrative overview of the Malaysian context, based on relevant literature and policy initiatives. The growing eating-out practice is driven by urbanisation, lifestyle changes, limited time for home cooking, growing preference for convenience, and rising incomes. While eating out has become a social norm, its increased frequency raises nutrition and public health concerns. Local evidence shows that many commonly consumed hawker foods are high in sodium, sugar, and fat, while lacking healthful ingredients such as vegetables, potentially worsening Malaysia's already high burden of diet-related non-communicable diseases. Existing national policies and programmes, such as the Healthier Dining Programme, MyMeal, Healthy Cafeteria and Healthy Catering Trainings, provide nutrition and food safety criteria for healthier meal provision. However, their reach among informal food vendors remains limited, and data on consumer awareness and uptake are scarce. Strengthening and expanding these programmes to better include informal vendors is crucial to increasing the availability of healthier meals. Other opportunities include developing healthier reference recipes for commonly consumed hawker foods to guide reformulation, exploring meal-based nutrient profiling to inform meal selection, using digital nudges within food delivery platforms, and enhancing consumer education. There is also an urgent need for representative national data on away-from-home meals, including consumption patterns, perceptions, demand for healthier options, purchasing behaviours, and their contribution to overall diet and nutritional status.