Founder of the collective catering company Sodexo, Pierre Bellon, died on Monday January 31, at the age of 92. Born on January 24, 1930 in Marseilles, he had created from scratch, in 1966 in Marseilles, the company which became fifty-five years later the world number one in collective catering, of which he remained the CEO until September 2005, is over 75 years old.
The group now claims a market capitalization of 12 billion euros, which claims to employ 412,000 people in 56 countries.
“Our father was a builder, a pioneer, a free spirit who was never afraid of taking risks”said Monday his daughter, Sophie Bellon, chairman of the board of directors and interim general manager of the group.
In the court of large multinationals
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 study at HEC, the school of advanced business studies, he will have to try four times before winning his entrance ticket.
With his diploma in hand, he returned to Marseilles and joined his father’s company, which supplied the boats on the Marseille-Algiers line with food. But, for this ambitious young man, 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, for “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 of Pierrelatte (Drôme) in 1964. In 1969, he “went up” to Paris with his 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 euros, and thus doubled the size of his company. Three years later, he took over the collective catering branch of the American 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”.
Left “from nothing in 1966”
Jovial, curvaceous and with his good-natured grandpa appearance, 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 around twenty trade unionists in 2011, who came to disrupt the general meeting of shareholders, whom he sent to ” to show “repeating that he was gone “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 twenty years at Sodexho, himself becoming honorary president.
Pierre Bellon was one of the executives of the CNPF, the National Council of French Employers, then of the Medef. In 1987, he was behind the creation of the Progress du Management Association, whose mission is: “The progress of the company through the progress of the manager”.