[RajT88]

My wife's university has a totally egregious contract which is exclusive to a food provider for cafeteria food and event catering.

If you want to, say, have a student group sell cookies or whatever, the provider has to approve and you have to pay to host it.

The contract is for 10 years. No freaking way somebody signed off on that without money under the table.

[bigstrat2003]

My wife's employer has a very similar thing going on. They have a cafeteria staffed by a catering company, and the contract requires that they (the employer) use the catering company for all things that take place in the building. A manager can't go out and buy donuts for a meeting, instead they would have to use the caterer who is both worse quality and more expensive. This caterer even tried to get the company to chase off food trucks that were coming to the area, though thankfully that went nowhere because the food trucks were on public streets and not private property.

It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to the employer that I can see. Like you, I conclude that some executive must have gotten kickbacks for signing this.

[wahern]

> It is truly an awful contract, with no benefit at all to the employer that I can see.

The benefit is having an operating cafeteria (i.e. an amenity) for a guaranteed period with little or zero out-of-pocket expense other than providing the space. Unless there's obviously high-demand (coffee?), no catering company is going to commit to a long-term contract without ensuring some minimum volume to maintain staffing. Anything food related typically has ridiculously slim margins on average, especially when you count all the failed projects.

Catering is often an exception, but not this kind of daily staffed in-place catering. The most profitable kind of catering is where you can prepare food offset for discrete (though hopefully recurring) events across many (hopefully repeat) clients, and where you can quickly ramp up or ramp down staffing and facilities to minimize recurring costs.

[diab0lic]

Sodexo or Aramark I assume? Unfortunately standard practice on University campuses across Canada and the USA.

[nick__m]

At my institution there was a student revolt, chartwell was kicked out and it is a work co-op. The quality has increased, the employees are better treated and the cost stayed the same, and stupid rules like that are no more !

[phantasmish]

Yeah, exact same thing when I was reluctantly involved in a club’s leadership and organizing an on-campus event with food 20+ years ago. I think it was Sodexo in our case. Must be common.

[RajT88]

Sodexo

[conception]

It’s probably more there are only two or three companies, if that, that can service a customer that large and meet their requirements/SLAs by contract. And the three all happen to have the same sort of agreements required.