Quality of food & beverage, location, and branding: these are the three main features that make an excellent company restaurant. This is the opinion of Eric Gerritsen, Pedevilla’s Marketing& Communication manager, during the conference “Corporate Wellness: focus on food and places” at the Herman Miller’s showroom in Milan, during the last Food Week 2018.
“The old canteen can be a place where I tell something about my firm”, a multifunctional and flexible environment, capable of maximizing the investment while fostering wellbeing and happiness of the workers.
“The quality of food is the core of our mission. But in time we have understood that this is not enough: the location and the facilities play a fundamental part in creating an excellent company experience”. This is the point of view on the revolution of the workplace canteens of Pedevilla, expressed by Eric Gerritsen at the conference “Corporate Wellness: focus on food and places” at the Milanese Herman Miller’s showroom during the Food Week 2018.
In his speech, Gerritsen has underlined three main focuses a company should follow designing a company restaurant: quality of food & beverage, location, and branding.
The restaurant has to be considered as a “flagship store”, a place that “spread company’s DNA all over” that really represents the story and the values of the firm.
Secondly, it has to be a flexible environment where different activities can take place all over the day, maximizing the company’s investment: it is not cost-effective that space, that often has the same costs of the offices, is used by the workers just for a couple of hours per day.
As several surveys often show, the lunch break in the workplace does not give a satisfactory experience. So the nowadays challenge is how to create a place that matches the wellbeing of the workers and the investment of the management.
Following the research Living Office by Herman Miller, presented by Simona Giacalone, Specifier Account, and Mario Colombo, Sales Director EMEA, we can define a company restaurant as a “Plaza”: the “third-space” and the heart of the workplace, where different activities take place and where workers can find different settings and facilities, as wi-fi and other technologies, to satisfy their needs in an informal atmosphere.
Finally, the company restaurant is also a medium among the different generations that co-habit the workplace.
“Millennials look for more fusion or ethnical cuisine. One of the first questions we make to a firm is the average age of the working population in order to adjust the menu in a different way”, Gerritsen concludes.
Besides the examples of canteens and restaurant before and after Pedevilla’s design we have shown here in the pictures, one of the last example is the successful experience of the Banca Mediolanum’s restaurant in Basiglio (Milan), where the focus on brand identity and wellbeing have created a scenic greenhouse-like place, told by Roberto de Mari, Medionalum Bank’s Chief Procurement.
Text by Gabriele Masi.
Opening and closing picture by Herman Miller.
