By Ülvi Gitaliyev
The name itself fills our mouths with a taste of disgust. Sodexo has had a monopoly on the taste buds of a vast majority of Berea College, but what exactly is Sodexo and why does its food suck? In the final installment of our series on Berea Dining, we shall take a look at the company that is in charge of Berea Dining and the ways that it can be improved.
Founded in 1966 in France, Sodexo is an international food service company with over hundreds of thousands of employees all around the world. They serve food for hospitals, colleges, and most interestingly, private prisons. The last one will be a special focus of this article.
Sodexo Justice Services, a subsidiary of Sodexo focused on private prisons, has a less than perfect track record. In the UK, where they directly run private prisons, there have been incidents of babies dying, illegal strip searches of inmates, tortured prisoners, and more. Such a systemically callous approach to the human rights of prisoners should discredit any company’s reputation, but unfortunately, Sodexo continues to operate private prisons in multiple countries.
Sodexo has also been found to serve horse meat at some of its locations and based on the results of the Dining Reform Movement Survey and casual discussions with Berea College students, their food could certainly be more delicious and healthy. Personally, I have coined dining food as “minimally acceptable.” Now, I am not blaming dining students workers or staff for the quality of the food since I know they are given specific recipes to follow and in many cases, a shortage of workers is what leads to rushed or under quality meals.
There are three alternative methods by which Berea College can take to improve Berea Dining:
1. Improve Sodexo at Berea Dining
As we have seen, Sodexo as a company is full of issues, but some of those are specific to Berea Dining and with enough effort, could be overcome. The treatment of student and professional staff, which many workers have complained about, seems to be part of a workplace culture that must be changed. Adding more strict and regular quality checks on the food served would go a long way in decreasing cases of food poisoning. This would be the most straightforward way in which we can improve the quality of dining for both staff and students without uprooting the currently existing system.
2. A New Food Service Company
You would be surprised at how many other food service companies are guilty of the same things as Sodexo, but there are a few torches (pun intended) out there in the darkness. Bon Appétit Management Company, a U.S.-based food service company, has a mostly clean track record in terms of animal welfare and other issues important to Berea College students. They are employed by the Metropolitan Museum, University of Chicago, and as far as we can tell, no private prisons, which makes them a morally superior option
The main problems with a new food service would be the (likely) higher term bill and loss of benefits for current Sodexo staff, though the first issue can be partially solved by making dining optional for students.
3. A Berea College Food Service
The third and last option would be for Berea College to create its own food service from scratch. This option would take the most time and effort, but it would also solve most of the problems discussed above.
Berea College is one of the few colleges in the United States that has its own farm and, thanks to our rural positioning, getting food directly from local farmers is also an option. Of course, some food would still have to come outside of the region, but having control over what comes in is a benefit not available with the current dining system. Fresh and healthy foods directly from Appalachia would almost certainly see a sharp increase in the quality of Berea Dining food. This option also allows us to retain the current staff.
You can read Part I and II of our dining series here and here respectively.
6 responses to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Sodexo”
mmm, horse meat.
It would benefit Berea College to look at its supply chains in everything they do and outsource. It would be inconsistent for Berea College to give business to a company that provides services to private prisons. It would be inconsistent in that one would hope Berea College upholds racial justice principles in all they do, and the private prison industry is notoriously racist.
wherre do they find these crazy companies
Try to do some actual research before writing something. You know, besides whatever pops up first on Google or wiki. As you stated, Sodexo is an international corporation and as such, serves many types of foods to many different cultures around the world that you may find distasteful but is culturally acceptable elsewhere. They’ve never served horse meat in the US and you lie by insinuating that.
Before your woke, privileged and entitled self gets all excited about Bon Appetit, it’s merely a subsidiary of (gasp!), Compass Group, a UK based food service contractor that’s much larger than Sodexo. I do agree that going the self op route is best, it’s also the least realistic. I highly doubt the university is willing or able to take on the huge addition of payroll, benefits, liability insurance, extra taxes, etc. Not without a large increase in tuition to offset it because existing meal plan rates certainly won’t cover it.
All this being said, I’m neither employed by Sodexo nor work for the school. Just stumbled across the article and saw it needed some reality.
I have eaten Sodexo food at Newberry College (now a university) as a member of the local community. SOME of the meat servings were too tough to cut without a true steak knife, & that was not available.
Newberry, SC
Note: contract not renewed effective June1, 2023 per my source
Been waiting for a phone interview and never happened. So I will not work for this company ever.