Sodexo Honored as Top 100 Group Meal Enterprises at China Group Meal Industry Innovation Cloud Summit

Shanghai, August 11, 2022 – Sodexo, the global leader in services that improve the quality of life, attended the 2022 China Group Meal Industry Innovation Cloud Summit organized by Tuancanmou and supported by CFIE, and was honored as Top 100 Chinese Group Meal Enterprises 2022.

Meanwhile, it was selected as a digital transformation case study in the 2022 China Group Meal Industry Development Report, demonstrating its practices in and contribution to promoting catering innovations and accelerating digital group meal ecological optimization.

The 2022 China Group Meal Industry Innovation Cloud Summit themed on "group meal innovation", profoundly explored the latest and future development trends of group meal to seek industry innovations and breakthroughs, and released and interpreted the 2022 China Group Meal Industry Development Report. At the same time, under the guidance of the Catering Committee of All China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and based on multi-dimensional considerations, the Summit selected leading enterprises and brands that are most representative of the industry and can drive the healthy development of the industry.

Innovation is the driver necessary for group meal enterprises to grow. In 2021, there are many changes in the catering industry. Due to the pandemic, the food ingredient standard, safety standard, purchasing standard, production standard, sales standard and consumption standard have all experienced huge changes. The catering market, particularly the group meal market, is moving towards the path of standardized, digital and diverse development.

Sodexo is transforming from traditional workplace group meal to digital catering, and from offline to online. We have been following the industry's cutting-edge insights, and, with our international perspective and many years of group meal experience, providing consumers with more customized and diversified services. In the past year, Sodexo sped up the transformation, comprehensively developed a new group meal model, stressed digital application and the innovation of service capabilities, established catering innovation labs to develop new menus, introduced multiple brands for rich menu choices, and thus brought upgraded meal experiences.

Based on the needs of customers and consumers, Sodexo's catering transformation will create seamless dining experiences of multiple scenes. Sodexo will also transform from a catering service provider to a catering experience manager. Sodexo's actions will focus on the following areas:

• Leverage digital innovations and big data to drive the traditional employee canteen to a fully digital canteen
• Explore and introduce intelligent cooking, and offer consumers with high standard, high quality and efficient dish preparation
• Invest in innovative intelligent equipment, change the traditional dining mode, break through the limitations of scenes, and bring more convenient and fast dining experience
• Invest in the central kitchen, optimize the food preparation, management, service and distribution processes, and satisfy customers' needs for cost and efficiency

For the purpose of standardizing the whole catering service process, improve the group meal supply capability, and build a new group meal serving model, Sodexo has built an entire standard, digital catering service chain:

 

Standard supply chain purchasing system

Supply chain management is critical to successful group meal business, while strict quality control and standardization as well as digital, visual control are the key factors to build a competitive supply chain system. When receiving raw materials, Sodexo inspects product temperature, documents, pesticide residue, packaging, labeling and sensory indexes strictly according to the standard operation procedures. The constant temperature warehouse, cold storage, freezer, dry goods warehouse and the entire cold chain distribution process can meet the storage temperature and humidity requirements of different goods. Meanwhile, through the OMS/WMS/TMS system, the first-in-first-out traceability management and validity control of raw materials are in place, building seamless connection between the demand and supply from the farm to the dining table.

 

Full standardization of food preparation

Digitalization is the core of Sodexo's catering transformation. Digitalization effectively reduces the inconsistency in food preparation. In Sodexo's professional kitchen, cooking can be done in a digital way – Sodexo's DRIVE platform can integrate the company's front-end purchasing and back-end service via the fixed core orders and the end-to-end process, enabling the chef teams of all sites to maintain the consistency of the food taste as long as they follow the standard operation procedures.

Different from the programming mode of the Western food, it is difficult to standardize food taste due to the complicated preparation process of the Chinese food. Sodexo's intelligent cooking robot can cook diversified and standardized food – our staff only need to put ingredients prepared according to the recipe in the identification area of the cooking robot, and press the button of the name of the food. One cooking robot can make 30 dishes within 2 minutes, and can cook over 600 authentic Chinese cuisines.

 

Digital consumption experience

In 2019, Sodexo started its strategic investment in the digital group meal platform Bon Appetit, and expanded the investment in and cooperation with Bon Appetit at the end of 2021. Sodexo builds an intelligent canteen online ordering system, in which users can order food online by means of WeChat and other APPs. Once the food is ordered online, it will be automatically queued online, and users do not need to wait at the counter. Meanwhile, a vertical screen ordering machine can be placed at the counter, and users can order and pay in the machine by themselves without the need for any manual service.

 

At the time of payment, an intelligent fast settlement system and a nutrition & health analysis procedure are adopted, identifying the dish images through the intelligent identification technology and conducting fast calculation. The dish information is identified in milliseconds, well documenting the food sold. Meanwhile, together with the payment system of Bon Appetit, the payment calculation speed is further increased. Scanning the dish, the calorie nutrition information and exercising recommendations for each dish will be displayed. While enjoying the fast dining experience, consumers can learn about the nutrition information of the food they are eating.

In order to effectively solve the issue of chaos in the food distribution site as well as the issue of users missing the mealtime due to reasons like meeting schedule, consumers can choose to pick up the food in the intelligent food cabinet at the time pre-set online. The food cabinet has the function of air heat insulation, thus can ensure that users can still enjoy hot food even if they miss the mealtime, significantly improving the dining experience of users.

At the moment, Sodexo has worked with the digital group meal platform Bon Appetit to deploy a digital catering operation system in 48 sites (data as of August 15, 2022) throughout the country, bringing consumers constantly improving catering experiences.

 

Data analysis to optimize dietary structure

Sodexo's digital intelligent backend can analyze various catering data. The canteen's intelligent data platform can accurately and intelligently calculate the food ingredients needed for the next day based on the number of diners, the amount of food eaten and the dinning time of the day, helping the canteen staff to make precise purchase without mistakes.

Sodexo is currently implementing the "WasteWatch" food waste monitor system in the multiple canteens it operates. By capturing food waste data before and after dining and conducting intelligent analysis, new catering activities can be planned. This can not only effectively reduce food waste in the preparation process, but also effectively feedback the food waste information to the supply end to constantly optimize the purchasing structure.

Since WasteWatch was started in Greater China in June 2021, Sodexo has deployed the system in 165 sites, identifying 3027 tons of food wasted and avoiding the waste of 219 tons of food (data as of August 15, 2022).

Wang Junying, Director of Catering Platform and Transformation of Sodexo Greater China, said, "I believe that in the future development of the group meal industry, product standardization, service benefits, and operation digitalization will become the three core competitiveness of China's group meal enterprises. Sodexo knows well that catering experience is an important part of the employer branding and value proposition, therefore, we will constantly explore new market needs through service capability innovation and digital technology application, and enjoy the 'love for food' together with our customers and consumers."