Entegra North America, a subsidiary of Sodexo and one of the largest food group purchasing companies in the world, serves more than 93,000 purchasing sites with $24 billion in purchasing power. The company feeds millions of people with millions of SKUS being shipped and received. The company works with hotel clients to help them save money on food and supplies by outsourcing food services, leveraging Sodexo’s food-and-beverage supply chain.
The Gaithersburg, Md.-based company dates back to 1999. CEO Damien Calderini said that the company’s name—Entegra—is a deliberate play on the word “integrity,” while the “e” underscores the digital aspirations of the company.
In the U.S., the company maintains approximately 1,800 manufacturing agreements—split between national and regional manufacturers—and it services hotel rooms at a variety of properties, from large franchised hotels to independent boutiques to those lodging properties right in the middle.
Disrupting the Industry
Though Entegra technically is a group purchasing organization, Calderini said the company is pivoting away from this tightly focused definition. “We don’t want to be known just as a generalist GPO who has 1,800 agreements with manufacturers,” he said. “We’ve pivoted to become an operations performance improvement company. We won’t tell our clients how to run their business, but we want to help and support them in everything that relates to operations. Because of our DNA, a lot of that gravitates around food-and-beverage operations, but we can go beyond that to areas like energy services, sanitation and services and more.” Though procurement services remain at the core of and essential to what it does, Entegra has added three more pillars to its structure.
First is advisory services. “Essentially now, we can help our clients not just get great prices but improve their margins, design menus, design recipes, optimize their back-of-the-house operations, we can train their kitchen staff, etc.,” Calderini said. Entegra has hired a chef and a team of culinarians to develop, test and taste new recipes; the team works with manufacturers and suppliers to try to find innovative solutions for the client and consumer in a way that is economically efficient for the client hotel. Digital and data is the next pillar, and the company is working on building a stellar digital GPO experience. Last year, Entegra launched a tool called EPIQ—Entegra Performance IQ—which allows clients to make smart decisions that are data-based. “We provide visibility and analytics around what they buy,” Calderini said.
The last pillar is corporate social responsibility. “Sodexo is leading the charge on everything around food and beverage sustainability even before it became a topic, and we are leaders in diversity, equity and inclusion practices,” Calderini said. “The great thing is that as a fully owned division of Sodexo, we get to leverage everything Sodexo has built over the years to bring to the client to help them achieve their own sustainability or DEI goals.”
Calderini said that the GPO world is ripe for disruption. “We’re leading the way by moving away from being almost a commodity to truly value added to our clients in multiple dimensions and helping them address all of their operational challenges,” he said.
A One-Stop Shop
Though food procurement is what the company historically has been known for, Calderini said Entegra can supply literally anything a hotel might need. “And if we don’t have it, we’ll build it for them,” he said. “We have a team dedicated to custom contracting. We have a team of buyers who will help clients source their specific needs. The ambition is to be a one-stop shop.”
Calderini is optimistic about the future, having expanded organically, including acquiring more companies and adding new services and capacities each month: “As we emerge and come out of this, we’re very optimistic, and we have a clear path and direction we’re following that we believe in.”
Logic in Logistics
When COVID hit, Calderini made a commitment to the team that not one employee would be let go. “I know some of our competitors lost 30 percent of business and fired 30 percent of employees. We made the exact opposite decision, not just because it was the right thing to do for people, but the bet I made was that these are the times where our clients will need us the most,” he said. Today the company is as strong as ever, with the company culture and behaviors focused on key elements such as integrity, transparency, inclusion, empowerment and candor: “All team meetings start with a candid moment. We ask a very open question. What are people thinking? What is an area we can improve on? What do our clients/partners think of us? It’s a fairly strong culture, even if it is evolving.”
Clicking with Clients
The pandemic has strengthened Entegra’s relationships with its clients, according to Calderini. Because Entegra maintained a full staff and emphasized communication and providing clients with useful resources and insight into what they needed, the company was able to meet its clients’ needs once hotels started reopening, he said. For example, on two separate occasions, when a hotel client had problems getting food from its distributor, an Entegra employee rented a truck, went to the distribution center, loaded up the truck and helped the staff unload the food. By word of mouth, that level of support to existing clients got out, leading to new clients. “It means more resources, maybe less profits for us, but our plan is to build something in the long run,” Calderini said.
Hilary Daninhirsch is a freelance contributor to Hotel Management.