Sodexo introduces Restaurant of the Future

Real life consumer research and innovation

Nico Heukels has been working for the global food service giant Sodexo since 1971. He started out as a chef, then became district manager, regional manager and, in 1983, R&D and Innovation Manager. And that is where he has remained. “At some point, the managing director told me that – despite the size of our company – we had to get our management talking about food and drink again. ‘Can’t you do something about that?’ he asked me. And that’s what I’ve been doing all these years: talking about food and drink. And more importantly, inspiring others with our work, our products, our ideas.” 

“My job involves developing products and innovating,” says Heukels. “So I’m always on the lookout for trends. One trend is health foods and healthy eating. Look, there are really no healthy or unhealthy foods in the Netherlands; people make healthy or unhealthy choices. And that is what we need to point out to each other and our children. This is a social necessity. As a catering business, we need to make different choices too: we need to change our assortment, to make it more attractive to choose healthy and tasty foods.

Another trend is regional products. They are definitely on the rise. People are increasingly interested in the origins of their food. But we still need to learn to put that stamp of origin on our products. Dutch cheese is world famous. We just neglect to put it on the cheese, unlike the French. We freely export our products without letting the world know what we’re good at. The great thing about regional and organic products is that they appeal to your sense of pride; if you’re not proud of a product, you will never claim it as your own.” 

Restaurant of the Future
“For the last ten years or so, we have been working closely with Wageningen University. They supply the knowledge we don’t have in-house. While working together we came up with the idea of building a restaurant where we could observe and trace consumers 24 hours a day. Consumer research in real life. So now that ‘restaurant of the future’ has been built. Our goal is to gather new information and give science an opportunity to use it to the benefit of the food and food service industries. Kids don’t eat apples, but why? Because they’re too big, or because they have to peel them? We know that taxi and truck drivers drink chocolate milk when they’re on the road, but why are they afraid to ‘confess’ this at home? The restaurant is the place to ask such questions. Can you tempt people to buy a product by spotlighting it or by lighting it in a particular color? Does background music affect people’s choices? The food industry can also contribute questions of its own. This research center may well be the jewel in the crown of R&D; instead of trying to feel our way, we can now work together on empirically discovering the truth.”

Trend-setting SMBs
“The interesting thing about our line of business is that we can innovate more freely than retail. We don’t have to wait until a consumer picks something; if we prepare it or serve it, it gets eaten. Retailers are dependent on the consumer to create volume, so they can never be trendsetters. The real food innovators are SMB entrepreneurs, your local baker and butcher. If they are successful, they are always imitated. So if the Netherlands wants to raise its profile as a hub of knowledge, then it needs to ensure that the SMBs – and the Restaurant of the Future is also mainly about SMBs – have access to the knowledge possessed by multinationals and research institutes. There has to be a link.”

World’s biggest catering company
Sodexo Alliance is the world leader in food services, with a total annual turnover of € 11.7 billion. It employs 324,000 people worldwide and operates in 76 countries. In the Netherlands, Sodexo manages 1,500 restaurants located at businesses, schools, hospitals and other care institutions, serving half a million customers a day. Sodexo employs 7,000 people in the Netherlands.

Sodexo Nederland was established when the Sodexo group bought Van Hekke catering in 1998.