Sodexo names Sophie Bellon CEO

At its meeting of February 15, 2022, the Board of Directors of Paris-based global contract services firm Sodexo decided to appoint Chairwoman Sophie Bellon as permanent CEO, a position she has held on an interim basis since October 1, 2021, following the resignation of previous CEO Denis Machuel. Bellon, the daughter of Sodexo founder Pierre Bellon, who passed away late last month, had served as company chair since January 2016, when she succeeded her father in that role in a planned succession.

The company, parent of the second largest foodservice contract firm in the U.S. market, had seen a revenue drop of 9.8% in its 2021 fiscal year, but that was in comparison to the 2020 fiscal year that operated in the COVID period for only about half its length. In the second half, when compared to the first six months of the COVID period, revenues were up 18.1%. In North America, it was a slightly stronger 19.4% gain followed by an even more robust 28.2% increase in the first quarter of fiscal 2022.

The Board expressed its full support for Bellon, who has successfully led the transition phase since Manchuel’s leaving and noted in its announcement that it considers her the best placed to lead the company through this new phase in its history. It cited “the very strong momentum around the priorities set by Sophie Bellon to strengthen Sodexo's competitiveness and accelerate its transformation,” noting in particular a project to develop and render more autonomous the company’s Benefits & Rewards Services activity, which would lead to providing it with a dedicated governance while remaining controlled by Sodexo. “In this context, despite the quality of the candidates evaluated as part of this search process, the Board of Directors felt that recruiting an outside personality would definitively slow down the momentum,” it concluded in its announcement statement.

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In a separate move, the board also decided to appoint Luc Messier, a Sodexo director for the past two years, as an independent lead director, with his main mission being to ensure the proper governance of the company. Messier is a former senior vice president for ConocoPhillips, where he was responsible for projects, aviation and procurement between 2007 and 2015. Since 2015, he has been president of Reus Technologies LLC, a technology development company that acts primarily as an angel investor in new technology, focused ventures.

A graduate of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales du Nord (EDHEC) business school, Sophie Bellon began her career in 1985 in finance and then in the fashion industry in the U.S., and became a member of Sodexo's board of directors in 1989. She returned to Europe and formally joined Sodexo in 1994 as project manager in the finance department, where she contributed to the successful integration into Sodexo of Gardner Merchant in the United Kingdom and Marriott Management Services in the United States, two strategic acquisitions that consolidated the company’s international scope and contributed to twice doubling its revenues. Following these acquisitions, Bellon became head of operational management control in 2001 to improve and streamline financial performance monitoring of the various subsidiaries, then was appointed group client relations director in 2005 and contributed to the significant increase in the client retention rate. In 2008, she was named CEO of the Corporate Services business unit for Sodexo France and in 2010 also added the role of head of Facilities Management activities in France. In 2013, in addition to being named vice chair, Bellon also took overall responsibility for Sodexo’s Research, Development and Innovation strategy with specific focus on Quality of Life issues under then CEO Michel Landel.

Given her eight-year tenure in the U.S. before joining the company formally, and her work with the Marriott integration, Bellon can be expected to be familiar with the American market, which represented 39% of the Sodexo’s Onsite Services unit revenues in fiscal 2021 and which has been making a series of strategic moves over the past year to position itself for continued growth in the post-pandemic contract services business environment, such as with the acquisitions of Nourish Inc., restaurant aggregator Foodee and, most recently, the Frontline Food Services c-store services firm.

"I would like to thank Sodexo’s Board of Directors for the support it has given me,” Bellon stated in the appointment announcement press release. “I will continue to rely on the skills and diversity of the members of the Board, as well as the commitment and expertise of the Executive Committee and our teams to accelerate Sodexo's transformation and strengthen its competitiveness. The principles that will guide my actions will be loyalty to Sodexo's values, entrepreneurial spirit, as well as efficiency and speed of execution. More than ever, I am committed to reinvigorating Sodexo's growth path, which has been part of the Group's DNA since its creation. Together with my family, we reaffirm our long-term commitment to maintaining control of Sodexo and supporting its development"