Fueling productivity through culinary experience

Good food has the power to shape how we feel at work.

It boosts energy, helps employees focus, and can bring people together to form stronger professional and personal connections.

As Executive Chef for Sodexo, Neil Yule is dedicated to designing and preparing dishes that not only taste great but also enhance employee wellbeing.

Now, as Executive Chef, the menu design and development for our client sits solely with me.

It’s exciting – I work across 2 sites and serve an average of 1000 customers every day. Customer profiles and tastes are varied, and we have the green light to showcase our flair for food – something we relish. 

A flexible food offer that’s fresh, modern and convenient

I lead the culinary team where I work, including cooking on site myself every day. This is a state-of-the-art building and we’ve developed a flexible offer that suits the modern, thriving environment.

We offer hot and cold options across four restaurant counters – plus a full deli range – everything is available to take away using reusable containers, allowing employees to eat meals and snacks whenever and wherever they want: at their desks, in breakout spaces, or outside. They simply return their containers to central points, and our teams collect them.

We’ve also introduced everyday – Sodexo’s digital ordering app – reducing queues through pre-ordering and offering users instant access to menus and nutritional information. 

Every chef likes to show off a little and I’m no different.

As someone with a long-standing love for all things patisserie and baking I’ve introduced some signature dishes – including a bread-and-butter pudding and cheesecake.

We bake all our own bread from sourdoughs to focaccia, and we have an in-house patisserie with a range of homemade pastries.

Another popular choice is our banana bread, which is made using leftover bananas that would otherwise have gone to waste.

We tie in with like-minded organizations too – ordering boxes from Waste Knot, which aims to get surplus veg out of farmers’ fields and into kitchens. It’s quality produce, and we use the ingredients to create salsa, pickles and chutneys, which are great flavor boosters.

It’s getting results: the climate footprint of our dishes are, on average, 1kg CO2e or less.

Beyond food, we’ve reduced our impact on the environment by banning single-use plastics and disposables, and advertising menus on screens rather than posters.

I think both our clients and our customers appreciate what we do; we’ve had great feedback.  They see us as experts and that makes me proud.

As a team we put love and care into every dish and it’s wonderful when that’s appreciated.