Minoprio Foundation in Italy

Ensuring an atmosphere where students feel at home

The Minoprio Foundation is a private school set in 64 hectares of natural parkland in Lombardy, northern Italy, with a mission to educate and promote research in agriculture and plant science. The park hosts more than 50,000 students and other enthusiasts on guided tours every year, while the botanical garden, tropical greenhouses, educational and agricultural centres offer well-equipped learning environments.

Some students live on campus away from their families, so it was important to the Foundation that boarders felt at home immediately and enjoyed a friendly, family-like atmosphere. Making students feel welcome, while also taking good care of the campus facilities, was a tough challenge for the Foundation as it required a wide range of skills and capabilities.

A team of experts dedicated to the foundations needs

To fulfil the Foundation’s needs as efficiently as possible, we set up a dedicated team of 12 people, including a chauffeur, maintenance technician, chefs and restaurant staff. An on-site manager ensured that solutions were rapid, reactive and in line with the Foundation’s specific requirements, which covered catering, energy-saving, cleaning and building maintenance.

Our Think Green project provided tasty meals using food grown on-site and to help students feel welcome and engaged, our menus were reviewed on a regular basis by a student working group. We also started a Creative Re-use contest where student teams could compete to create useful new objects out of recycled products they found in the restaurant.

In the kitchen and dining area, we replaced paper cups with glasses, scrapped placemats and introduced napkins made using paper from sustainable forests. We also recycled water, purchased eco-label products for cleaning and used timed lighting and lower temperatures to save energy.

We found a new source of revenue for the Foundation by organising events and promoting these to the Foundation’s clients, such as schools and senior homes. Because we already worked with 250 other schools in Italy, we were also able to organise tours for the Foundation from these establishments.

Finally, we created a customised service for the Foundation’s greenhouses to monitor and manage the temperature and humidity levels to nurture and preserve their collection of rare species hothouse species.

Sodexo’s integrated services bring new business to Minoprio and inspire other schools

Thanks to our extensive experience of delivering Quality of Life services in schools all around the world, we have a deep understanding of student and staff needs. Thanks to our maintenance services, which now perfectly matched contractual Service Level Agreements, service reaction times are now faster and we have reduced costs.

Anna Zottola, Head of Minoprio Educational centre and campus, could see how our innovations allowed students and staff to experience a higher quality of life and improve their performance: “Since we have chosen Sodexo for maintenance, service and reaction times have been significantly reduced. That implies that we don’t have to worry about it anymore and we can focus on our core activity, thus confirming the importance of choosing a reliable partner.”