Wondering who’s behind your burgers?

Sodexho is just that company that feeds Pitt students, right?

Wrong.

Sodexho employs… Sodexho is just that company that feeds Pitt students, right?

Wrong.

Sodexho employs 344,000 people at 27,700 sites in 76 countries, making it the leading food and facilities management services company in North America. It also recently settled a discrimination case to the tune of $80 million.

The company has eight areas of expertise.

It caters major international events, provide services to inmates and the military, supplies open living spaces for senior citizens with a variety of activities, maintains services and hygiene in the healthcare industry, initiates dining programs on campuses and partakes in major industrial projects at remote sites.

Phew.

And there’s more.

In addition, through the Sodexho Foundation, the company supports initiatives that help American families who battle poverty, unemployment, lack of education and food insecurity.

However, at Pitt, students experience Sodexho only through dining services.

According to Jodi Ludovici, who works in Sodexho Campus Services, it takes extensive research to determine what food is served at a university.

Researchers use a process called “Lifestyling” to determine taste profiles and value for spending. In order to determine what to offer, they use students’ home ZIP codes and analyze their geo-demographic backgrounds, review surrounding competition, find where students report their food dollar spending, compile trend data on the restaurant and fashion industries and conduct surveys on students’ food preferences.

“Sodexho has spent the last several years becoming experts at identifying the customer behavior on university campuses,” Ludovici said.

Sodexho has also spent the last several years fighting some major legal battles.

In March 2001, thousands of black employees filed a lawsuit against Sodexho Marriott Services, according to an April 2005 Associated Press article.

The employees said they were denied promotions and segregated by the company. Sodexho agreed to an $80 million settlement in April 2005 to be distributed among 10 lead plaintiffs and 3,000 employees who worked for the company between 1998 and 2004.

It was one of the largest race-related job bias settlements in recent years.

In another situation, according to a February 2001 article in the Cape Cod Times, a Barnstable High School student found a fragment of a cafeteria worker’s thumb in a turkey-and-tomato sandwich. A day earlier, the worker had cut off part of her thumb while slicing tomatoes.

Barnstable Board of Health did not categorize the incident as a major health violation because there were no eyewitnesses, but inspectors theorized that the slicer was not properly cleaned.

Sodexho Marriott Services — the company that managed the cafeteria — was hit with three citations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. After the incident, the company held district-wide training sessions on the use of knives and slicers, personal protection equipment and physical safety policy.

The history of Sodexho actually does not begin with food: It started with ships.

Frenchman Pierre Bellon took his family’s ship supply business in Marseilles, France, and transformed it into a food services company in 1966. He began with one corporate dining room, and then moved on to catering services for schools and hospitals.

Now it’s at the top of the industry in North America.

The name Sodexho is an acronym for the French phrase, “Societe d’Exploitation Hoteliete,” which loosely translats to “a company of service and hospitality.”

The parent company, Sodexho Alliance, is still based in France, and its North American subsidiary is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md.