French Caterer Elior On A Buyout Hunt For India’s Office Canteens 

French caterer Elior Group wants to buy its way into India’s office cafeterias as it vies with global rivals like Sodexo and Compass Group for a larger share of the market in Asia’s third largest economy.

Having acquired two Indian food services providers, Elior plans to spend Rs 1,000 crore to take over more local companies and expand aggressively to the north, Sanjay Kumar, chief executive officer at Elior India, said in an interview to BloombergQuint. “We are in talks with three firms for a buyout and will be closing them by the end of this financial year.”

Banking on expansion and investments in technology, the company targets the second spot after Sodexo in the $3-billion catering market that’s growing at 15 percent annually, Kumar said. Elior provides about 150,000 meals daily to 70 companies at Rs 350-700 each. It also offers low-priced food at one automotive firm in Chennai at Rs 60 a day.

Corporate catering is a fragmented market and Elior expects consolidation to continue. Since entering India in November, it has bought Bengaluru’s MegaBite Food Services and Chennai's CR Caterers India Pvt. Ltd. The company is setting up one centralised kitchen in Bengaluru and Chennai each.

The Bengaluru kitchen will serve technology clients such as Cisco, LinkedIn, Visa and Microsoft. Built at a cost of Rs 30 crore, it will have 200 people working in shifts. Some of Elior’s other clients include Uber, MRF, Daimler, Pfizer and Shell.

“There are multiple segments which do not exist in India, like defence and the railway,” Kumar said. There is also a huge market for healthy food which consumers are willing to pay for, he said. “We are catering to from big clients to employees of big manufacturing industries.”

In the premium end, Elior has MegaBite and for scale in a standardised, industrial setup, it has CR Caterers, Kumar said.