Covid, Oricon: 8,000 collective catering workers at risk

One third of those employed in the corporate catering sector are still in layoffs (around 8,000 employees). With volumes and revenues stable at the already very low levels of 2021, their reabsorption would not be an easy task. This is what emerges from a recent Oricon survey carried out in December 2021. “After the severe backlash suffered by collective catering during the first wave of the pandemic (in 2020 the sector recorded 40% less revenues and volumes), with schools in Dad and closed offices, in 2021 the sector had begun a phase of slight recovery in volumes and had found, albeit with great difficulty, a planning approach. Now – explains Carlo Scarsciotti, president of Oricon Collective Catering and Nutrition Observatory -, with this new pandemic wave, the small positive signs recorded in recent months have vanished. “Despite the fact that companies, with their usual resilience, have adapted to the situation to stay on the market by developing new ways of providing their services (smartlocker, app and delivery) , with the massive return to smart working – underlines Scarsciotti – corporate catering will once again suffer a stop. A situation that if it were to continue over time would give the sector a strong push with very negative consequences for entrepreneurs and workers. “Oricon, in light of the resumption of infections from Omicron, has designed two scenarios in order to evaluate the impacts of the new wave on Collective Catering sector still struggling to recover from the general stop of 2020. In the worst, and most likely, of the two scenarios on the recovery of the sector, the uncertainty linked to the current situation of infections weighs heavily, with absences from work destined to grow exponentially and consequent lower presences in canteens, and a new mass use of smart working. In this context, the volumes of meals produced would return to the levels of the first four months of 2021, when the country was almost entirely in the red and orange zone, or in a de facto lockdown All this would compromise the recovery started in the second half of 2021, when collective catering a had recovered by 25% compared to -40% in 2020, and growth would stop at 3%, postponing the return to pre-pandemic levels by more than two years. The revenues of the corporate segment would thus consolidate at 896 million euros in 2021 and sales volumes at 148 million meals, a quarter less than the pre-pandemic levels, when the values ​​stood at 200,589,000 meals and 1,198,000,000 in revenues. The second scenario, currently considered less likely, sees recourse to smart working in line with the last quarter of 2021, when remote workers were just over 4 million compared to 5.7 million in the previous March. In this case, the corporate catering sector could continue the recovery path started last year, growing by 14% in 2022, while still remaining far from pre-pandemic levels (over 15 percentage points below 2019).