The collective catering group Sodexo, a global giant in its sector, announced the death of its founder and honorary president Pierre Bellon, Monday in Paris, at the age of 92.
Founder of the collective catering giant Sodexo, Pierre Bellon, who died Monday at the age of 92, created from scratch in 1966 in Marseille a company that became 55 years later the world number one in collective catering. Born January 24, 1930 in Marseille, Pierre Bellon remained CEO of his group until September 2005, more than 75 years old. The group is today a juggernaut with a market capitalization of 12 billion euros, which claims to employ 412,000 employees in 56 countries.
“Our father was a builder, a pioneer, a free spirit who was never afraid of risk-taking,” his daughter Sophie Bellon, chairman of the board of directors and interim chief executive of the group, said on Monday. waiting for a successor to Denis Machuel. Father of four children and grandfather thirteen times, he was 10 years old when he lost his mother and entered a Jesuit college. Determined to do HEC, he will have to do it four times before winning his entry ticket.
Running his business “down to the penny”
With his diploma in hand, he returned to Marseille and joined his father’s company which supplied the boats on the Marseille-Algiers line with food. But, for this ambitious, the sector of the future is the one that Jacques Borel has just created: collective catering. For 100,000 francs granted by his father, he created his meal tray company called Sodexho, a hotel operating company (which became Sodexo in 2008). He delivers his meals with his van in Marseille.
Then, with the nerve and the beard of his already established competitors, he obtained the contract for the new cafeteria of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Pierrelatte (Drôme) in 1964. In 1969, he “went up” to Paris with wife and children. Managing his business “to the penny”, according to a relative, he broke with the sacrosanct principle – not to go into debt and to develop solely through internal growth – in 1995 with the acquisition of the British Gardner Merchant for 700 million dollars. euros and thus doubles the size of his company.
A jovial man, with formidable tantrums
Three years later, he took over the collective catering branch of the American giant Marriott. With these acquisitions, Sodexho enters the court of large multinationals: a feat for its boss who admits to speaking English “like his feet and with his hands”. Jovial, curvaceous, and with his good-natured grandpa look, Pierre Bellon knows how to attract sympathy. He enjoys playing the naive and his insatiable curiosity leads him to fill entire notebooks with notes.
His anger is also formidable: his collaborators, his family, everyone goes through it. Including twenty trade unionists in 2011, who came to disrupt the general meeting of shareholders, which he sent to “show off”, repeating that he had started “from nothing in 1966”. Paternalist, the man, made Commander of the Legion of Honor and the National Order of Merit, needed to be surrounded by people he trusted, hence his reluctance to resort to external promotion.
His succession has long been a taboo subject. He ended up dubbing in 2005 Michel Landel, for 20 years at Sodexho, himself becoming honorary president. Pierre Bellon was one of the executives of the CNPF, then of the Medef. In 1987, he was behind the creation of the Association Progrès du Management, whose vocation is: “The progress of the company through the progress of the manager”.
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