Sodexo Leads Group Catering 3.0 Era by Upgrading its Consumer-oriented Food Transformation

Shanghai, 24 February 2022 – Sodexo, the world leader in Quality of Life Services announced its new roadmap in food transformation through innovative dining ecosystem and food service capabilities enhancement. These upgrades aim to provide its consumers with diverse, customized and seamless dining experiences.

In the post-pandemic era, consumers’ dining experiences are being reshaped due to shifting views of the work and life balance, as well as the emerging focus on health and well-being. Customization, convenience, affordability as well as healthy food options now dominate consumers’ minds when making purchase decisions.

Taking the workplace as an example, employees' demands for flexible and diversified dining experiences are driving an evolution in workplace catering. Coinciding with this is the gradual emergence of a demand for personalized dining experiences that bring satisfaction and pleasure to employees. The future of workplace catering will no longer be limited to the traditional group catering model and instead should be full of vitality and empower employees to experience a more comfortable workplace environment.

With global experience and insights accumulated in the Chinese market, Sodexo is constantly accelerating the new trends in consumer-oriented food models to meet the needs of consumers, keep pace with their dining preferences and provide them with customized food services and unique dining experiences.

 

Digital technology and service capabilities innovation resulting in an improved dining experience

Martin Boden, President, Sodexo Greater China, said: "At Sodexo, we understand that the workplace dining expereince is an important part of the employer branding and value proposition.Leveraging service capabilities innovation and the application of digital technology, we look forward to working with our clients and consumers to share our love of food."

Dining experiences have gradually become a key indicator to measure employees' cognitive performance, productivity, physical and mental health, and corporate culture fit. Employees hope that their employers can create a richer workplace experience with the workplace dining experience improvement. Sodexo is committed to providing innovative services, which take into account consumers’ needs to enrich their dining experience:

• Develop new dishes by establishing a catering innovation laboratory.
• Introduce multi-brands into its food portfolio to enrich dining options.
• Build central kitchens to realize the combination of onsite cooking and mixed cooking to improve the efficiency and taste of meals.

Digital application is an important enabler for Sodexo to improve the dining experience of consumers through technology-enabled services, which mainly focuses on the following areas:

• Use big data to analyze various catering-related information, as well as timely feedback and adjust recipes according to the sales frequency of dishes, so as to provide  more personalized food services.
• Explore and introduce new technologies for intelligent cooking, as well as cook diversified and standardized cuisines by using digital cooking equipment such as intelligent cooking robots and intelligent networked cooking ovens.
• Enhance investment and partnership with digital group catering platform Meican, to create an innovative model supported by digitalization, multi-scenarios and big data.

 

The new trend of future workplace catering – a consumer-oriented dining model

Despite the dramatic changes in working styles and spaces, the dining experience is still at the core of enabling workplace transformation. It will become increasingly important for companies to pay close attention to the needs of their employees while dynamically adjusting their catering models.

 

Dockside - Digitalized Smart Restaurant is another Sodexo initiative aimed at comprehensively improving its catering operations and promote the consumer-oriented group meal model. By creating a digital, multi-scene and new concept smart workplace catering innovation model in the restaurant, it provides unique practices and benchmarks for Sodexo to develop diversified and customized group meal 3.0 services.

In Sodexo's future smart restaurant, consumers can experience a seamless dining experience. The application of digital technologies such as smart buffet lines and online ordering and pick-up mini-programs optimize the pick-up process and further optimizes consumers' dining experience.

At the same time, in the business philosophy of Sodexo's future group meal model, the function of the restaurant is not limited to dining. The Dockside is more about providing a dynamic and convenient space for interaction. Consumers can use this space flexibly. Party, work or meet here.