News

April 21, 2009

Without a Truck, Sodexo Looks to Cut Engine Exhaust

Sodexo isn’t in the transportation business, but one of its major environmental objectives is cutting truck exhaust, a goal it’s striving to hit through smarter ordering.

“We get deliveries of food and other supplies, about two or more per week, at the 6,000 facilities we serve in North America,” said John Friedman, a spokesman for the multi-billion-dollar contract feeder. “With just our four primary vendors, that’s 8.7 million road miles and 300,000 deliveries. If we can take that down to one delivery, we can cut the carbon emissions in half.”

Late in 2008, the company set out to curb unnecessary deliveries by rolling an awareness program into four pilot markets: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Virginia. “More than anything, it was about educating and communicating with our managers,” said Chris Weiser, senior director of operations for the foodservice giant.

In a nutshell, he explained, the managers were encouraged to analyze the supply processes they’d always used but likely never scoured for inefficiencies.

“I’m not sure in the past that delivery was given that much thought,” acknowledges Weiser.” They didn’t necessarily think about what the effect might be of reducing one delivery a week when you looked across a year.”

Sodexo opened their eyes to the environmental impact, then jump-started the thinking. “We had them taking a good, hard look,” says Weiser. “’Look at the way you’re menuing, look at the last minute catering requests, look at your inventory. Let’s try to eliminate the emergency deliveries. Let’s try to optimize the scheduling,’” so the distribution drops would be bigger and less frequent.

The effort dovetails with Sodexo’s objective to use more locally grown products, another of its environmental initiatives. The company has already set up a network of 600 farmers to supply onsite operations across the country, Friedman says.

Environmentalists view local sourcing as a major way of cutting carbon emissions because the supplies are hauled for shorter distances.

Weiser says Sodexo has yet to quantify the impact of its carbon-reduction program, but is already extending it to additional markets. The big expansion push will come in late spring and early summer, he adds.

The environmental payback is obvious, he says, but the initiative also makes financial sense for all parties involved: “Certainly there are business benefits to being more efficient. We’ve gotten very good response from our managers and our customers.”

Many of those customers—the host sites that contract Sodexo to run their feeding operations—have made environmental pledges to their own constituencies; the delivery initiative can help them meet those obligations, says Friedman.

Distributors also appreciate the effort to spare them extra fuel, says Weiser. “All the major distributors now have people in charge of reducing carbon emissions, so it made sense to work together,” he adds.

The company is refining remote-learning tools to teach more of its managers about optimizing their deliveries.