Save Money and Make Money with Zoined Restaurant Analytics

The full interview with Christian Hallemyr, Head of Food Services and Brands at Sodexo Norway.

About Sodexo | Sodexo Norway

Sodexo operates at a scale few can match. Founded in 1966 and headquartered outside Paris, it serves 80 million consumers every day across 45 countries, with 423,000 employees and €23.8 billion in consolidated revenue in fiscal year 2024. Source

In Norway, Sodexo has been present for 40 plus years, with around 1,100 employees and revenue is about NOK 912 million. The team runs 60+ sites and the current portfolio is built around two concepts. Eat by Sodexo is the everyday canteen that delivers reliable value and OM:HU is the high end expression for clients who expect to be surprised and delighted. Our interview took place at Storebrand’s campus in Oslo, which had been remodeled and reopened as an OM:HU restaurant about a year earlier. Christian summarises their operations like this:

“We project restaurants. We build restaurants. We build meeting centers. We fill them with experience, with food, events and recipes”

The Challenge | Before Zoined

Picture a Tuesday lunch service with no clear view of your operations.

Sales sit in one system, staffing in another and purchasing somewhere else. By 9 a.m. there is no time to pull it all together, so prep and staffing are based on gut feel rather than data. The chef plays it safe, cooks for more guests than expected and adds extra staff, hoping demand will justify it.

Lunch starts, but traffic is lighter than last week. A nearby site gets busy and needs help, yet without central visibility no staff are moved. By early afternoon it is clear too much food was prepared and the extra staff were not needed. Waste goes up, labour costs follow and margins take the hit.

After service, finding out what went wrong would mean hours across multiple systems. Instead, tomorrow’s orders are placed and the same decisions repeat.

This was roughly life before Zoined at Sodexo Norway. Scattered data, no live view of traffic and planning that cost time and profit. Christian comments on it as follows:

“The data quality we collected was really hard to get a hold of, in the end you maybe did not know if you could trust it”

The Turning Point | Why Zoined

They started to notice that they can't continue running the organisation like this. It was time to accept that decisions would only speed up and improve if everyone had some way to look at the same data. Each of the five or six systems told a slightly different story, so no one was completely sure which numbers to trust. This needed to change with, so they began looking for a restaurant reporting software that could integrate these systems. That is when they found Zoined's analytics software for restaurants.

Christian comments it like this:

“One of the major things we changed is collecting the data into one endpoint through Zoined, compared to before when we had five or six different systems”

Together with our partners at Yonoton, Sodexo Norway switched to a more data-driven omnichannel approach to their operations. Yonoton now facilitates all sales and ordering and Zoined's Restaurant Analytics guides their operations.

Zoined Implementation

Sodexo Norway started with Zoined's 30-day free trial. After confirming it matched their needs, they rolled it out across the organisation without disrupting daily operations. Sales data from Yonoton was connected first, then other systems followed. Data that used to live in separate tools was brought into three department based views. Finance for the full portfolio, restaurant managers for site level performance and the concept team for trends and menu mix.

Onboarding a large organisation still takes coordination, but the difference was immediate. A shared structure was set early and reused across sites, so teams worked from the same numbers and decisions moved from hunches to facts.

Adoption was driven by a simple habit. Chefs and managers were encouraged to use the dashboard directly and report from what they saw there, not from separate spreadsheets.

“In my organization, it is much better to use the dashboard. We would rather that they, the chefs, go inside the dashboard and create the report and report it back, because then we get proof that they have been there, done that, read it, understood it.”

Results & Impact

With Zoined's Restaurant Analytics in place, the previous reporting was replaced by one endpoint and decisions now run on the same truth. Hour by hour trends guide what to promote and when, Dishes that miss margin targets come off the menu and staff move from quiet restaurants to busy ones. Ordering follows rolling averages and now waste has come down, service runs smoother and Sodexo makes more money.

Christian sums it up like this:

“It is very useful to use for upselling. We see whether we sell this or that at a given hour, then choose what to promote at which time of day and on which day of the week, and decide if it is worth the margin and the upsell.”

The effect is felt both on the floor and in monthly reviews. Promotions are decided faster, conversations between finance, restaurant managers and the concept team are clearer, and production plans fit demand rather than hope.

Key Takeaways

Drawn from our interview with Christian, these takeaways are mainly for multi site, high traffic restaurant and catering teams.

• Begin with one truth. The moment sales, staffing and menu data meet in a single place, conversations shift from opinion to evidence and actions follow faster.

• Design by role so each level sees what they need. Finance reads the full portfolio, operations and restaurant managers live in their own locations and the concept team tracks trends and menu mix, all of it anchored to the same numbers.

• Let margin police the menu. If a dish misses its target it should not stay, and when the data proves it the decision feels obvious instead of personal.

“It is user friendly on all levels, from the chef up to the CFO, and we can create our own layers in it”

Christian comments.

Conclusion

Sodexo Norway has turned scattered data into a working engine for growth. With restaurant analytics and restaurant reporting in one place, teams back the dishes that earn their place and time promotions based on real restaurant KPIs. Average spend rises because upselling becomes more precise, focused on what sells at each hour, not what should sell in theory.

At the same time, waste and overtime fall. That lifts margin and leaves more of every day’s revenue on the table. Pricing and menu changes are measured the same way across sites, so winning dishes scale faster, and underperformers are fixed or removed. Christian’s point is simple:

“In the long run it saves us money and makes us money.”

Using Zoined improves daily decision making, and the results compound over time. But his view is also that this is not the end state. The next step is to bring insights closer to the people making the calls in the moment, especially chefs, so actions become as easy as asking the right question.

AI in Restaurants | The Future with Zoined

“If an AI agent could do this easily, it would be more user friendly. They should ask, where do I make the most money, which dish is most profitable for me, why was last Monday bad.”

Christian explains this view of the future clearly. The need is not more reporting, but faster answers in plain language. This is where AI for restaurants becomes practical. In seconds you see what changed, why it changed, and what to do next.

This is exactly the direction we at Zoined are building toward with AI in the restaurant industry. We call it ZED, take a look.