Catering sustainably and deliciously at Sodexo

Serving delicious and tasty food is what motivates us. Planning a craveable menu and embedding sustainable food habits is the way forward to on-board consumers and make a positive impact.

One of the ways we are working towards our Net Zero ambition is by continuously training and engaging our teams to deliver sustainable food options to our clients and consumers. As part of our culinary training programs, we’ve added a masterclass to inspire our chefs and catering teams to continue incorporating more sustainable ingredients including whole cereals, pulses, vegetables in our menus.

The masterclass has three main objectives: helping to upskill our chefs and food service team, improve our environmental impact, and encourage healthier eating habits among our consumers.

Why did this Masterclass idea emerge? 

Discussions with colleagues led us to think that we needed something more to help us in our quest for more sustainable food: 

  • Climate change, with food representing 1/3 of the global greenhouse gases, and a growing world population,
  • Having a plant rich diet is not a mainstream food habit in Continental Europe, although there are some exceptions from Nordic and Mediterranean countries. 79% of citizens believe that adopting more sustainable behaviors is urgent (International Sustainable Food Barometer) and 45% of citizens are engaged to change their food habits (Obsoco Study), consumers are asking for a change!
  • Food is one of the great ways to lead a healthy life and eating more vegetables, grains, pulses and whole cereals has a huge impact. Our objective is to provide healthy lifestyle choices to 100% of our consumers!
  • Our Sodexo chefs are eager to learn more about how to cook plant-forward dishes and low-carbon menus. They’re the catalysts of the shift we want to operate on a global scale.

You both won the 2023 Innov’Challenge due to this masterclass.

How did it make you feel?
We were so happy and proud to be part of this project and team! The cultural shift towards sustainable menus is ongoing and winning the Innov’Challenge makes us believe it’s possible to bring it to the next level. It also helped us to be more visible within the company and build our credibility to sell this masterclass to our leadership team and other Sodexo regions.

We were also able to create an inspiring collaborative workflow with our US colleagues as they had another project with similar objectives. We will now work with them on this topic to make a bigger impact.

How many masterclasses were conducted so far?

A pilot masterclass was held last June with Belgium and Austria. We are now rolling it out with 3 upcoming masterclasses in the coming months. Our teams in France have also adapted the initial program, giving it their local context, and are now deploying it.

What was the most rewarding feedback received from participants?

Seeing the sparkles in our chefs’ eyes was so rewarding! They also told us that having several countries participating in the masterclass as well as food services colleagues coming from different backgrounds, made them feel like “one team”, working together.

Overall, a wave of optimism and lots of action-oriented conclusions to spread the cultural shift and best practices across Sodexo.

More about the masterclass

Through this masterclass we want to implement a quality over quantity strategy, less meat but better quality. Within the masterclass we encourage several things:

  • the design of delicious plant-based, vegetarian and plant-forward dishes that are lower in carbon and nutritionally balanced,
  • creating a renewed enthusiasm among our chefs to inspire them to cook delicious plant-based dishes that are easy to create on our sites locally, 
  • reflection upon strategies to engage our clients and consumers to adopt this food cultural shift
  • we also highlight our efforts to buy the right products, for example: animal proteins with higher animal welfare standards, use of pulses and diversified cereals.
  • The content of this masterclass is the product of a strong collaboration between our teams (CSR, Learning & Development, Food Services) and Humane Society International, an animal protection NGO with which we worked for this project.

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