Elior Group cooks India strategy

French commercial catering and foodservice company Elior Group, which recently marked its entry into India, aims to enter the league of top three players in the country, alongside Sodexo and Compass Group.

The company entered India through two acquisitions — a majority stake of 70% in CRCL and 100% stake in MegaBite Food Services. Elior India CEO Sanjay Kumar said, “The business category is growing at a CAGR of 17% in new emerging markets, therefore, it was the right time for us to enter Asia. India was a natural choice because the expansion in workforce in India is rapid and significant in terms of size.” The company serves most top corporate offices in the South Indian market, including the likes of LinkedIn, Google and Uber. “As of now, the company serves 1.4 lakh meals per day. We want to double this number in three years with some organic as well as inorganic expansion of our client base,” he said.

Elior Group, owing to its acquisitions, claims good market presence in the corporate offices space, and seeks to enter the hospitals space. “We are already catering to a client base of corporates i.e. workplaces as well as factories and some top educational institutions. We want to acquire some clients in the hospitals space, where there is sufficient scope for growth,” said Kumar.

Explaining how the company sees India as a lucrative market, he said, “Market barriers in India are many, especially with the regulatory framework requiring a company like ours to get up to 352 licences. However, the risk to reward ratio is high, which makes it encouraging to expand operations here.”

While the company is looking to make more acquisitions in the space, Kumar said the industry is rather fragmented, and it would not make sense to acquire small players, who cannot help scale the business right now. “The industry stands to consolidate in the near future as focus on quality increases. We will look at making acquisitions then from a scalability point of view,” he said.