Hotels; catering; tourism and Employment

Catering

Catering, seen as the basic activity of serving food to individuals, may take various forms.

Restaurants are open to the public at large and serve food according to consumers’ orders. Most of them are owned by private individuals. In contrast, fast food outlets, which usually serve basic, quickly delivered meals, are owned by transnational companies. Other forms of catering activities include contract-catering (also called institutional catering) where subcontracted companies serve meals to specific communities like group of workers on an industrial site, pupils and students on education campuses, hospital workers and patients, etc. The contract catering sector, although scattered between a number of local companies, is dominated by three major companies: Compass Group PLC, Sodexho Group and Aramark. Together they employ directly some 1 million workers and are operating in between 18 and 90 countries.

The catering activity linked with transport is also dominated by an ever lower number of large transnational companies. This is especially true with airline and railway catering. These two activities have been in slow decline in recent years due to the multiplication of high-speed trains and low cost airlines that do not for reasons of time or cost offer the same level of quality catering as previously. Institutional catering provides up to one-half of all meals served outside homes, varying from country to country. Catering is an important activity for the whole sector, as even smaller public restaurants increasingly rely on pre-prepared food from industrial services.