Overall ranking: 12 (18) 

Foodservice  ranking: 2 (3)

Philip Jansen – Snapshot
Philip Jansen is the chief executive of Sodexho UK and Ireland, the second largest contract caterer in the UK’s £3.865b foodservice market. Its food and management services encompass business and industry, education, healthcare, remote sites, old people’s homes, defence, and prisons.

The UK and Ireland is Sodexho’s third largest market after Continental Europe and North America and accounts for around 11% of its business.

Sodexho UK and Ireland currently employs 48,000 staff across 2,300 client sites. In the year to August 2005, sales dropped by 3.6% to €1.3b and earnings before interest, tax and amortisation (Ebita) fell 4.8% to €27m.

Philip Jansen - Career guide
Jansen, who is 39 this year, started his career in commercial roles at consumer products giant Procter & Gamble. 

He became a senior executive at Dunlop Slazenger before joining Telewest, the UK’s second largest cable TV, broadband and telecoms group, as managing director of its consumer division.

In September 2002, he joined MyTravel as European chief executive and was promoted to group chief operating officer a month later. He became chief executive of Sodexho UK and Ireland on 1 October, 2004.

Philip Jansen - What we think
Jansen was brought in as a troubleshooter to restore profitability to the UK division, which has been dogged by financial and leadership problems since 2002.

He was hired for his extensive sales and marketing skills and his proven ability to execute turnaround strategies. This was part of his remit at MyTravel, which he stabilised and reshaped, and at Telewest, where he boosted revenues over three years by 30% to £950m and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation by 70% to £390m.

In November 2002, serious errors of management and accounting anomalies in the UK were blamed for a 10% slump in group operating profits. The French group shuttled in Mark Shipman from the USA to head up a recovery plan in the UK. He was then replaced in January 2004 by Francois-Xavier Bellon, who was forced by ill health to retire months later in May.

The key problems lay with forward sales for the grounds maintenance division, underperforming contracts and poor client retention in business and industry (which accounted for 90% of the decline in UK sales).

The plan was to make contracts more profitable by offering more services at existing sites and, by mid-2003, multi-service sites accounted for 20% of existing and 50% of new business. By this time, Sodexho had also axed its 20 most unprofitable contracts (worth £13m) in business and industry.

It exited the hotel management business, terminated its six-year restaurant partnership with Gary Rhodes, and invested £5m in training and motivating site managers (where staff turnover had reached 30% in 2001). Sodexho also started dealing direct with growers and abattoirs and elected to shun school catering contracts worth less than 55p a meal.

The parent company posted better than expected results in the year to August 2004 thanks to an improved performance in the UK, where profit margins rose to 1% from 0.8%. At the time, it estimated it would take three years to return the UK to the 4.5% margins growth enjoyed by the rest of the group.

In an exclusive interview with CatererTV in June 2006  – his first since he took on the job - Jansen said Sodexho was now two-thirds of the way to being back on track.

He slated the UK industry for allowing customers to try and re-engineer its cost base as opposed to looking at the value of the service offered and similarly scathing on the subject of school meals.  “How on earth did the industry agree to do meals for 25p a day?” he asked.

Sodexho, in common with arch-rival Compass, set a minimum 55p spend per head head for school meal ingredients in March 2005 – a decision that left many councils unable to attract any bids at all for their contracts.

In April 2006, Jansen launched a wide-ranging review of Sodexho’s education strategy after Jamie Oliver’s campaign for better quality school meals had slashed the uptake of school meals by up to 10% in some areas, denying caterers the volumes to fund improvements.

The review was half-complete by June, but Jansen said any conclusions would have to await the implementation and funding of the Government’s new nutritional standards that came into force in September.

Jansen pinpointed the need for large companies to become more selective in their business to avoid running out of steam and diluting their offer.

Philip Jansen – Further information

Sodexho UK company profile on CatererSearch

Sodexho company website

Sodexho financial information

Other information on Philip Jansen