Sodexo

As a global leader in food and facilities management, Sodexo works with 33,000 organizations in 45 countries. They directly interact with over 80 million consumers every day. If you’ve ever visited the Eiffel Tower, a major stadium, a daycare, a hospital, a university, or a retirement home–you’ve probably been served by a Sodexo operator in some way.

The Sodexo mission runs deeper than safely providing food services and facilities management. They’re committed to real improvements, day after day, for millions of people, which can have a big impact on individuals, society, and the planet.

Struggling with consistency

Sodexo’s journey with SafetyCulture started with a golden question: How do you ensure consistency across thousands of sites? Sodexo needed a digital system that could help deliver a more consistent experience for its workers and customers across the globe. 

Sarah Porter, Vice President, Corporate Services Operational Excellence at Sodexo, rose to the challenge. She pulled together a group that could help drive digitization changes in US food service sites. The team included Catherine Cuticelli, District Manager, Allison Pietrucha, Director of Retail Implementation at Sodexo, and Mark Price, Senior Vice President at Sodexo.

With a need for good structure, good resources, and good systems, they looked to the SafetyCulture platform to help them achieve operational excellence—implementing inspections, heads-up, assets, analytics, training, sensors, and more.

Until 2018, Sodexo relied on in-person or Facetime visits, and staff members completed inspections and checks via spreadsheets and (often) outdated documents. There were frequent menu or brand rollouts across hundreds of sites, but there was little room for feedback from the teams on the frontline. Consistency was a struggle due to a heavy load on manual processes and a lack of oversight. 

A few things stood in the way of achieving the operational excellence they strived for. They simplified their goals to three simple measures of success: making the lives of unit managers easier and more effective, improving competitiveness in the market, and maximizing commercial results.

Streamlining food safety regulation records

As a food provider, some regulations have to be met at the federal, state, and government levels. HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) is one of them. This essential food safety program in the United States ensures that food is safely handled at every step, from procurement to plate, allowing providers to serve their guests with confidence.

Pre-SafetyCulture, it was common practice for Sodexo workers to fill out HACCP logs on paper, which would be stuck to the fridges, and collect coffee rings or sauce splatters throughout the month. By reporting time, they were nearly unreadable. Once filed away, leaders like Sarah couldn’t track potential trends and had restricted oversight of site compliance.

Sodexo used Inspections to digitize the HACCP process. Frontline workers such as chefs, supervisors, and general managers could now investigate food safety issues, pinpoint the cause instantly, and proactively address potential incidents.

Sodexo has now digitized over 30 HACCP logs in 40% of its sites and saved over 83,000 paper pages in the process. Having this information readily available for regulators also alleviates potential downtime and closes the gap between frontline workers and management, making the lives of unit managers easier. 

Inspections are also used for allergen signage, delivery receiving logs, and many other checks. They all contribute to the 250,000+ inspections Sodexo workers have done since starting with SafetyCulture. Now, every worker is responsible for consistency.

Going above and beyond by automating and streamlining

“We go above and beyond what’s required to ensure guest safety and the best experience every day” – Sarah Porter, Vice President, Corporate Services Operational Excellence at Sodexo.

Management saw immediate benefits, like real-time site visibility, after implementing the SafetyCulture platform. They wanted to take it to the next level. Sarah and her team knew that automating and streamlining manual tasks would help drastically reduce the administrative load.

If a fridge or freezer failed or was left open accidentally, it could cause a significant drop in temperature without notice, and food would go to waste. Sensors were introduced to automate temperature monitoring of their fridges and freezers. 

Fridges, freezers, and other kitchen or retail equipment can be set up as Assets. From there, managers can scan a QR code and complete an Inspection, take the Sensor temperature recording, and answer specific questions to check that the equipment is running correctly.

Over 950 Sensors and 6,216 Assets have been deployed at 306 Sodexo sites. They’re helping reduce stock loss to nearly zero at every deployed site.

Using the SafetyCulture platform, Sarah has real-time on-the-ground monitoring and visibility from Sodexo HQ. She can take the administrative load and determine what needs to be done to maintain workers’ and guests’ health and safety so that the frontline workers can focus on their core.

Standardizing brand rollout through Training

Without a unified training tool, Sodexo found it difficult to monitor who had completed training on brand rollouts, menu offerings, and guest experiences. Because they worked across both East Coast and West Coast time zones, a single training session that captured everyone at once wasn’t feasible or accessible. Once again, Sodexo was up against the golden question.

With thousands of sites to reach and many more staff to train, they introduced SafetyCulture’s Training feature to centralize all training resources. Allison broke down this lofty goal into a three-stage milestone approach. “It’s a way to make big tasks feel less overwhelming and more achievable,” she says.

This approach empowered workers on the frontline to take training, digest the learnings, and provide feedback. It propelled Allison, Sarah, and senior management into a continuous improvement mindset cycle.

With training in the SafetyCulture mobile app in every worker’s hands, over 6,700 courses have been completed, and managers have quick access to training and operational data. It’s given Allison and Sarah confidence that each brand is up to the Sodexo standard. The experience would be the same if you walked into a site in California, Connecticut, or Florida.

And for the most important messages, Sarah credits the Heads Up feature to reach everyone she needs as fast as possible. “Heads Up is a power I take very seriously. When I send a Heads Up, everyone knows they need to lift their heads and look at the message,” Sarah says. “If we have a global outage, we can quickly reach our people with a solution, and they’ll need to acknowledge it—even the President. And you know if the President acknowledges these messages, it sets the standard for everyone else,” she adds. 

Using the SafetyCulture platform has saved Sodexo over 8,000 management hours by smoothing the training system, improving internal communications, and making the platform accessible to everyone.

“Our operators are the heartbeat of what we do. They’re meeting different demands, and their needs vary, but there is one consistent theme. They’re time-starved. We can give them the gift of time through SafetyCulture,” Allison said.

A recipe for success

Sodexo is looking forward to cooking up more workplace operations improvements using the SafetyCulture platform. Although there are still more business units, customers, employees, and communities to serve globally, the future looks peachy.

For Sarah, using SafetyCulture to gain visibility over her 1,000+ sites across the US has made the scale of Sodexo’s operations feel much less daunting. “We’re reaching more sites than ever before. They’re getting the support and resources they would never have had if we hadn’t utilized SafetyCulture. That’s all we’re trying to do. It’s not going to change everything, but if we can take away some process they have to do every single day, we’re helping make their days just a little bit better.” she concludes.

The results mentioned were captured at the time of this case study (May 2024).