Innovate with Sodexo Business and Industry

May. 02, 2024

Sodexo, a leading food and facilities management partner, has developed an Innovation Lab alongside a global pharmaceutical client. As a start-up founded by Pierre Bellon in 1966 with a novel approach to corporate dining services, the entrepreneurial mindset has always been part of Sodexo’s DNA. With operations in over 80 countries, we partner with hundreds of start-ups across the world to integrate emerging technologies into our business.

Are you ready to scale-up with Sodexo?

Our innovation initiatives aim to bring start-ups from across the world into collaboration with Sodexo and our clients. To date, Sodexo has launched 17 innovation programs across seven regions, and this marks the fifth in partnership with L Marks.

This Innovation Lab will offer the opportunity to test your solution in a live consumer environment at one of our pharmaceutical client’s sites. If your pitch is successful, you will receive key insights from subject matter experts and develop a pilot, with the aim of scaling your solution to other key locations.

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Here’s what we’re looking for:

Sodexo aims to stay ahead of innovative trends to propel the business through improved efficiency and quality, ensuring an industry-leading experience for our clients. For this lab, there are several opportunities for us to work together:

Workplace Experience

Sodexo is committed to exploring innovative solutions beyond the industry norm to offer our clients. As we continue to navigate a return to the office, we are interested in novel ways of creating a physical workplace that offers elevated levels of customization and ease of access. We are interested in solutions that can help us better understand and provide for client employees within our managed sites, including personalization, ergonomic equipment, on-site rentals, and predictive software that encompasses the workplace experience. We also know that wellness within the workplace is extremely important and aim to increase our offerings by further utilizing existing spaces – creating a culture of health and a deeper workplace community.

Safety & Risk Assessments

Our pharmaceutical clients perform groundbreaking work within laboratories across the globe. Sodexo is committed to improving the safety of this important work. As such, we are interested in solutions that can digitize risk assessment processes while maintaining a high safety standard. We are particularly interested in predictive risk assessment models, including those that can identify potential risk within laboratory and office environments. We are also looking for solutions that integrate EHS dashboards and can serve as a central repository for open EHS tickets, providing detailed action tracking for risk mitigation, as well as solutions that help with safety communication and signage. Solutions that relate safe walkway navigation and material transport are also of interest.

How does the Innovation Lab work?

Text: If you are ready to scale your idea with a company of Sodexo’s vast reach, and you have considered our focus areas above, please apply through our portal. Once you have submitted your details, we will work with our partners, L Marks, to review your responses and see if you’re an ideal fit for the program. L Marks may be in touch to gather further details and is there to answer any questions you have before your details are submitted to the program committee for review.

Applications close on April 22 2024. Selected applicants will be invited to pitch their innovative solutions to Sodexo and their pharmaceutical partner in late May.

Why accelerate with Sodexo?

Sodexo’s Innovation Lab is designed to help you develop your solution, starting with deciding on a specific use case, receiving essential guidance from key stakeholders, and proving the value of your solution to Sodexo and our partners. Each start-up’s experience will be unique as we work together towards a pilot.

The lab provides you with exposure to Sodexo and client leadership and allows you to learn from our decades of experience in our market sectors. Ultimately, we want to build a long-term relationship based on trust and collaboration.

About our program partner, L Marks

L Marks is a leading global innovation specialist which has created over 90 programs with its partners in Europe, Asia and North America. Founded in 2014 with an established presence in the UK and the US, L Marks has developed and delivered results-driven corporate innovation solutions, trusted by world-leading brands including BMW, Lloyd’s of London and Arsenal FC.

Through their award-winning Innovation Labs, L Marks’ partners have worked with over 400 startups with a successful deployment rate of over 70%. The L Marks New Ventures unit supports its clients to create and develop new revenue-generating businesses through its Venture Studio, and transform their corporate culture within their Intra-Lab.

Our global experience

We collaborate with start-ups all over the world. Using our years of knowledge and wide-ranging market experience, we can help start-ups to pilot and scale their ideas to the highest level. Find out more about our worldwide innovation experience.