Connected fridge, self-service, top-of-the-range brasserie… corporate catering is reinventing itself

“The lasagna is to die for, I also recommend the salads, there is a choice. » Patricia Gaston, administrative manager at Siaci Saint Honoré, is visibly happy to find her canteen. “Everything is very clean here, I can even have the list of ingredients and that reassures me. » Indeed, in front of her is a “smart fridge”, which displays the daily specials on a touch screen.

It is 12:30 p.m.: the employees of the twenty or so companies present in the Equinox building, in Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine), therefore crowd in front of refrigerators from the start-up Foodles, which have the advantage of be available at all times. Taking a tray automatically debits the user’s account, thanks to sensors on the containers. The dishes, cooked every morning in a large “laboratory” located in Saint-Ouen (Seine-Saint-Denis), or at partner caterers, can be eaten on site or taken away.

In addition to these fridges, employees have access to a cafeteria which notably offers a breakfast offer, a salad bar and made-to-measure sandwiches, and a stand offering a dish of the day served on the plate. The 300 guests are divided fairly evenly between the four solutions of this new kind of inter-company canteen.

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With the health crisis, a large number of traditional company restaurants have closed or started to idle. Despite a slight rebound since the end of the confinements, they are struggling to recover their pre-crisis attendance. For example, Sodexo France says it has regained in June 2022 only 73% of its June 2019 attendance. The drop in demand is turning “ around 15% to 20%, with a more pronounced phenomenon in the tertiary sector”says Olivier Schram, associate director of PH Partners, a strategic restaurant consulting firm.

A place where you can eat

When acquired by investment fund HW Capital in March 2021, Equinox is half full, and is seeking to attract corporate tenants. At the start of 2022, the decision was made to replace the traditional self-service restaurant with a multi-service catering space, which was entrusted to Foodles, a foodtech which operates in 350 sites in France and serves 10,000 meals a day.

“We wanted a more modern player, cheaper, more user-friendly, and which could please everyone”, recalls Cyrille Phan, partner at HW Capital. The majority of building employees work from home two or three days a week. They can, thanks to the fridges, take away meals for their day away from the next day.

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