In Fiscal 2023, with the Board of Directors’ support, we continued to make choices, and to take a highly proactive approach to managing our activity portfolio. In April, we announced a project to spin-off and list our Benefits & Rewards Services, which have been renamed Pluxee in June 2023. Accelerating profitable growth for this activity is one of the three pillars of our 2025 Strategic Plan, which was announced last November. This is a milestone moment in our Group’s history, with the operation setting out to create two leading pure players in high-growth markets. The Pluxee spin-off, expected early 2024, will anchor both companies in a clear position in their respective markets and give them a more targeted strategy and dedicated resources, equipping them both with the means needed to reach their full potential. In September, we also announced that we were selling our Homecare activity.
We are also making headway with implementing our two other strategic pillars. We have accelerated the transformation of our food services, actively deploying our leading commercial brands — particularly Modern Recipe, The Good Eating Company and Kitchen Works — aligned with specific consumers’ needs. And we continue to roll out our advanced food models. As an example, this year we acquired A. H. Management to expand our InReach offer across North America’s booming convenience market. We are also developing new decentralized production models, in particular in France, Chile, the United States and India. In addition, we are continuing to develop our Facilities Management services by targeting those that help boost our clients’ operational effectiveness and enhance the consumer experience.
Naturally, we are doing more to bolster the social, societal and environmental efforts that lie at the heart of our ambition to be the world leader in sustainable food and valued experiences. We are striving to reduce emissions across our entire value chain, collaborating with our suppliers and engaging our teams to offer an ever-broader range of sustainable, healthy, and desirable recipes, optimizing energy consumption in partnership with our clients, and accelerating the fight against food waste. Our holistic approach is driven by our focus on impact. We are taking action for the planet, with an overall -20.7% decrease in emissions across scopes 1, 2 and 3, falling in line with the 1.5°C trajectory. And we are taking action for those who inhabit it, starting with our own teams. This year, we announced and started to roll out our global employee benefits program, Vita by Sodexo. The program sets minimum standards for benefits in all the countries where Sodexo operates, focusing on three benefits: life insurance, an assistance phone line, and parental and care leave.
In terms of governance, given the growing role tech and digital have in shaping our activities, Alice Guéhennec joined our Leadership Team as the newly appointed Group Chief Tech, Data & Digital Officer.
Streamlining our organization and transferring P&L management to a local level in Fiscal 2023 has increased our agility and speed of execution. The progress made on our strategic priorities, along with our teams’ total focus on fundamentals such as client retention, commercial development, operational excellence, and consumer satisfaction, have paved the way for us to achieve solid results.
We are now ready to take on Fiscal 2024 with confidence. This will be a pivotal year in terms of reaching our 2025 Strategic Plan objectives, and I know I can count on our Leadership Team’s full support: I would like to extend my sincere thanks to every member of the team for all their dedication and hard work. We will be tackling this year with a great deal of enthusiasm: this will be the year we start work on our next ambition, with Sodexo as a pure player, focused on its strategic priorities, clearly positioned on a very high-potential market, and determined to be a top-tier name in sustainable food and valued experiences.
Fiscal 2024 will be an opportunity to look beyond the scope of our current strategic plan and build on our solid foundation—our values, our mission, our heritage as a family company—to lay the groundwork for the future, engage our teams on our vision for the next 10 years, and start working collectively on our future ambition. Our goal will be to express what differentiates us, in keeping with our roots and our company mission. We already know that our trademark human dimension, our social role and, of course, our expertise in healthy, sustainable food, will all play a major part in this process. Our future ambition will have to articulate how the transformation we have embarked on to offer ever more sustainable meals and innovative, personalized food services will enable us to contribute even more to addressing the challenges the world is facing.
We have the means and the responsibility to act on issues such as the environmental crisis, demographic and health challenges, social division, and isolation. We will also take full advantage of technological progress, of young generations’ engagement, of the need for social connection, or the yearning for a more humane society.
I am determined to position Sodexo as a leader that differentiates through its impact and its corporate responsibility, in our sector and beyond. We want to be recognized by our clients, our partners and society as a whole as a pioneer. It is part of who we have been since Sodexo was created in 1966, and we want to push it even further.
Naturally, our teams will be a fundamental part of this work. I have said it before, and I will say it again: our people are our greatest strength. Without them and the action they drive day after day, nothing would be possible. And I am delighted and so proud to see that their engagement has reached an all-time high this year, at 82.5%, up 4.2 points compared to the last survey conducted in 2021. I am especially grateful for their trust and confidence, and their attachment to Sodexo.
