Overall ranking: 34 (32)

Contract caterer ranking: 8 (6)

Mike Audis - Snapshot
Mike Audis was promoted from the role of chief executive officer of Avenance UK to become chief executive officer of Elior UK in March 2005 following a restructure of a company that had rapidly grown into the UK’s fourth largest contract caterer.

It targets the B&I, education, healthcare, stadia and leisure centre, retail, defence, travel, heritage and defence markets.

The group’s parent company, Groupe Elior of France, operates in 12 countries and is the world’s fourth largest contract caterer with sales in 2005 of €2.8b and profits of €140.4m.

The UK arm has a £238m turnover and employs in excess of 10,000 staff across more than 750 contracts. It serves more than 250,000 meals a day across 1,000-plus venues, including multi-site contracts with Marks & Spencer and Tesco.

Mike Audis - Career guide
After working as a trainee hotel manager for two years, Audis spent the next 25 years with contract caterer Gardner Merchant (now Sodexho).

He worked progressively with Ford at its Dagenham plant, its European headquarters in Brentwood, and its southern operation before integrating vending and catering across 51 Ford sites.

He was promoted to deputy regional director for the North East, and then for the South, before rising to sales and marketing director. After Sodexho Alliance of France bought Gardner Merchant in 1995, Audis served as managing director for Gardner Merchant UK South for four years.

Audis then ran his own consultancy until 2002, when he became managing director of Avenance’s two southern regions. A year later he was promoted to director of new business development and, in June 2004, to chief executive of Avenance.

Mike Audis - What we think
Mike Audis heads up a much more streamlined company than his predecessor, who built the company up through a series of acquisitions. The reorganisation reflected its rapid expansion since Elior of France bought the £14-turnover High Table in 1992. It quickly added Hallmark, Drummond Thompson, Brian Smith, Catering & Allied, Nelson Hind Trout to the group that became Avenance UK in 2000.

Audis now presides over two key divisions. Avenance is the contract catering arm handling the business and industry sector, which represented 90% of group turnover in 2003. The specialist markets division combines the concessions business of Eliance Restaurants and its subsidiary brands Digby Trout Restaurants and Azure Support Services.

Digby Trout runs restaurants in historic sites such as Edinburgh Castle, the British Museum and the Tower of London, along with in-store restaurants in House of Fraser department stores. Azure is the sports and events caterer in which specialists markets bought a 51% stake in late 2004.

The specialist markets division now also runs Avenance’s education, healthcare and defence contracts, which is a sector Elior had targeted to grow to 40% of group turnover. Audis installed a new sales team to handle this sector while director of new business.

The concessions business has also been earmarked for growth. Although it has pulled out of the motorway service area business due to the paucity of purchasing opportunities, Elior wants is keen to become a major player in airports, railways and museums.

In early 2005, Elior added the high-class patisserie brand Paul to some of its airport and historic sites and set up a central bakery to support its London sites. It has also opened franchised Puccino’s coffee bars at railway stations in Milton Keynes, York and Watford.

Elior is one of the few large education caterers to have remained unscathed by Jamie Oliver’s high-profile campaign to improve the quality of school meals as it has consistently refused to consider the under-funded contracts that have militated in the past against a fresh food offer and have bought average ingredient spend per head as low as 25p.

However, the promise of extra funding from the Government has prompted the group to reverse its blanket veto on the state school market. In September 2006, announced an estimated £500,000-worth of Private Finance Initiative business in Swindon, Wiltshire in which Avenance singed seven new-build primary, special and secondary school contracts.

The group’s parent company in France is currently going through the process of returning to private ownership in a bid to regain control of its destiny from finicky investors that it feels has undervalued its continued growth.

Mike Audis – Further information

Elior profile on CatererSearch

Elior official website