Innovate with Sodexo
As a start-up founded by Pierre Bellon in 1966 with a novel approach to corporate food services, the entrepreneurial mindset has always been part of Sodexo’s DNA. Today, as an organisation spanning 56 countries, we partner with over 100 start-ups across the world to identify emerging technologies and business models.
Are you ready to scale-up with Sodexo Accelerators?
Sodexo’s global Accelerators programme reaches start-ups across the world to welcome collaboration and make innovation thrive. To date, we have launched 13 programmes across five regions (France, China, India, Brazil and Sweden). And now, we are introducing Accelerators to the UK and Ireland.
Accelerators provides the opportunity to test your innovation in live consumer environments within our client sites, the home of some of the world’s leading organisations. If your pitch is successful, you will receive mentoring from our senior executives, gain insights from subject matter experts, and there’s the potential for future investment, too. Find out more in our video, or head straight to our application portal.
Watch the video here
Here’s what we’re looking for
Sodexo is unlike any other organisation. We are proud to serve millions of people every day across a wide range of sectors. We create workplaces that engage and motivate employees, we support national infrastructure with our many years of experience in public services, and we serve-up amazing live experiences in remarkable venues. This means we have lots of opportunities to collaborate:
Employee experience
The end user of the services we provide – the consumer, the worker, the student, the patient - is at the heart of what we do. Every day, we aim to improve their quality of life, recognising that everyone has a unique experience.
Smart buildings
At Sodexo, we use global insight and the latest technologies to support our clients’ workplaces with solutions that optimize safety and boost efficiency.
Sustainability
With thorough and ambitious strategies to reach a carbon impact of net zero, a focus on local supply chains, and a drive to provide education and choice to prevent food waste, we are committed to responsible and sustainable practices.
Wildcard
Sodexo UK and Ireland has the privilege to touch the lives of people in a huge range of market sectors. Our work spans corporate food service and event hospitality to facilities management in essential national infrastructure. Can your innovation help us advance our ambitions?
How Sodexo Accelerators works
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 confirm your suitability for the programme. L Marks may be in touch to gather further details and are there to answer any questions you have before your details are submitted to the programme committee for review.
Teams selected to join the programme will be required to sign a participation agreement. L Marks will also work with the teams to carry out additional checks for the individuals involved to check they are not precluded from working in the United Kingdom; validate their identity; complete a credit and criminal history check; validate employment and education history for the previous 3 years; validate their highest education records and complete a CIFAS check.
Here are the key dates of the programme:
- Pitch day - 4 April 2022
- Programme live - 9 May 2022
- Midpoint review - 14 June 2022
- Demo day - 13 July 2022
Why accelerate with Sodexo?
Sodexo Accelerators is designed to help you develop your solution, starting with deciding on a specific use case, receiving essential guidance from your mentors and demonstrating the value of your solution to Sodexo UK & Ireland. Each start-up’s experience on the programme will be unique - we tailor the mentoring and education programmes to meet your business specific needs.
The programme has four stages: application, pitch, programme and demo. This gives you the opportunity to reach Sodexo’s elite client base, and learn from our decades of experience in our market sectors. Ultimately, we want to build a relationship based on trust and, if our collaboration throughout the programme is successful, we hope that you’ll see us as the first port of call when you need feedback on your new products.
About our programme partner, L Marks
L Marks is a corporate innovation specialist and early-stage investor. They build bridges between large corporates seeking to innovate more quickly with young companies with disruptive technologies, products and services. Founded in 2012 by serial entrepreneur Stuart Marks, they run bespoke start-up partnership programmes across industry sectors, working closely with partners like BMW, Arsenal Football Club and Lloyds of London, to identify where they believe the challenges are in their businesses and then turn these into opportunities for improvement and innovation. Each programme is tailored to deliver real solutions to the corporate partners and create real opportunities for start-ups to test and grow their product with a major partner.
Collaboration with Irish start-ups
Through Sodexo Accelerator, we support early-stage, growth-driven companies through education, mentorship and opportunities with our global organisation. We want to collaborate with Irish start-ups and help them to take their business to the next level. We’re interested in all start-ups that can help us, in one or more of the categories described above. Your start-up needn’t be at the very beginning of its journey. Maybe you have a product already, maybe you even have paying customers. If you feel that your start-up could benefit from working with us, we’d love to receive your application.
