Dion Moult Seriously who ever reads this description.

Sodexo – food for the masses.

On 13 November 2009 with 5 comments

Sodexo (formerly Sodexho Alliance) is a French multinational corporation, one of the largest food services and facilities management companies in the world, with 355,000 employees, representing 130 nationalities, present on 30,600 sites in 80 countries. For fiscal year 2008 (ending August 2008) revenues reached 13.6 billion euros, with a market capitalization of 5.6 billion euros.

That’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, though UrbanDictionary sings a slightly different tune.

1. adj. Extremely bad tasting, nearly to the point of torture.

2. adj. A state of extreme illness caused by low-quality cafeteria food; That pile of steaming shit I just ate tasted almost as bad as a Sodexo; I feel really Sodexo; I think I’m going to puke and have diarrhea at the same time.

Of course, the actual definition is disputed on UrbanDictionary and variants include “greasy unidentifiable shit” and “Sodexo is gayness”.

Unfortunately our school is plagued by Sodexo. A good couple years back they likely popped a couple pictures of an “ideal” school canteen for proper international students for the headmaster to ogle at as compared to the localised package we were receiving at the time. During the summer break the entire canteen (both of them) got a merciless rework to prove that stereotypical Malaysian inefficiency is nothing compared to Sodexo queues.

I’ve written about Sodexo before rather briefly but this picture deserves to be repeated as 1000-word says-it-all introduction to, what exactly, my good sir, is Sodexo?

That’s a plate of “butter and spaghetti”. I do believe this is evidence for the “greasy unidentifiable shit” mentioned previously. By unidentifiable I mean that quite literally – for the staff themselves don’t know what’s going on your plates. I remember a conversation I overheard from my friend:

Friend: What’s this dish?

Staff: Hmmmm, not sure.

Friend: It looks like pumpkin, but the ends look like meat, I’m vegetarian.

Staff: I think it’s either pumpkin, or it could be potato. I think there might’ve been some meat put into it, not sure.

… and no, that wasn’t exaggerated. Look at how they name their dishes:

and another to reiterate my point:

On Monday just this week I decided to have “fried fish”. On Tuesday I was served an almost identical dish except that the fish was considerably softer and no longer crispy. It had miraculously been rebranded as “sweet and sour fish” and there was some gloup to accompany it. On Wednesday I was again presented with a dish that suspiciously looked as though it was two days old and yet again relabeled as “fish with lemon sauce”. The lemon sauce looked identical in all respects to the gloup served the day before with the exception of several deformed lemons dunked in a fashion that would make a girl’s throw look good.

That’s just the woes to do with food quality – or rather lack of it. Prices fluctuate worse than the stock market and several factors including time of day, the colour of your plate, and how happy the cashier is feeling will determine how much you’ll have to dish out. The prices tend to peak on Thursdays, presumably when they realise they aren’t going to meet their sales figures for the week.

Of course, all of this is old news. Sodexo has a reputation for being rather terrible, both on the outside and the inside. Their controversies on working conditions and hygiene leaves expectations as good as a glint of hope in the distant horizon – or at least until their contract expires. At the end of last year during an assembly the headmaster announced the results of a survey – the best and worst things about the school. Sodexo achieved the honorary title of “the worst thing in the school” – and accordingly received a standing ovation of a good 500 or so students for it.

Please excuse me, I have to go take a Sodexo poop.

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