Consulting Projects 2017-18: Eaternity

Eaternity

Project Title:  Growing Eaternity’s climate friendly business and the market for climate friendly food

Company background

Eaternity’s goal as an ambitious but still small social business is to shape the future of gastronomy. It aims to provide the tools for sustainable menu options in any restaurant.

Eaternity started in November 2008 at the ETH Zürich, when co-Founder Judith Ellens won first prize at the ecoworks-workshop. Her idea was to measure and reduce the environmental impact of the food & beverage operation of restaurants. Back then food was widely ignored when it came to reducing climate-threatening greenhouse gases. The impact of the food supply chain, however, is measured at 1/3 of all CO2-eq. emissions and is therefor bigger than the global transportation sector.

In 2009 Eaternity launched its’ first project at the ETH canteen of the Science City campus, run by SV Group. The CO2-impact of all the meals offered at the canteen was calculated and Eaternity worked together with the cooks to create and serve the first ever climate-friendly menu to the public. After a lot of voluntary work under the Eaternity Association, other project requests and media interest began to materialize and Eaternity started to grow. In July 2014 Eaternity AG was founded. Today, the company supports players in the restaurant industry, providing them with the expertise, knowledge and tools to turn restaurants into climate-friendly operations.

Overall goal of the project

The overall goal of the project is to grow Eaternity’s customer base. Eaternity is currently working with a total of 250 restaurants, mainly in the corporate catering industry in Germany and Switzerland. Next to enlarging its existing customer base, Eaternity particularly aims at accessing new market segments through cooperations and joint ventures with providers of procurement systems and menu planning software, as well as policy lobbying on the institutional, state-run level of the food service industry (hospitals, nursing homes, schools).

Overall objective

Eaternity is looking to develop and grow its markets through:

Cooperations and joint ventures with:

• software providers for restaurant management systems (e.g. calcmenu, mbs5 etc.)
• food logistics (e.g. Saviva, Migros, Metro, Gemüsering)
• professional cooking schools and publishing houses of educational material (e.g. a-b-z.ch, PAULI)

Sales to institutional, yet independent corporate caterers (e.g. Daimler, Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, Audi, Bayer, BASF, DB Gastronomie, LZ-Catering, Evonik)

Lobbying for policy execution in support of state-run, climate friendly food offerings (e.g. schools, hospitals, nursing homes etc.)

The objectives will be defined more specifically at the project launch.

Inputs for the project

• Sales documentation
• Studies in the fields of climate-change, agriculture, health and environmental studies
• Coaching
• Prospective customer database

Activities of the project

• The steps in the project include: lead generation, custom solutions, (Eaternity: deal closing), customer support, case studies (on customer relations)
• Workshop on market segmentation: scheduling by the first half of November
• Prioritization of different customers and developing customized solutions for prospective customers
• Developing customized deliverables for different customer segments
• Implementing deliverables and writing case studies of the new customers

Project outputs

• 1st phase (by December 2017):  Develop a qualified lead list of target customers
• 2nd phase (by March 2018):  Develop customized marketing- and product offerings for target customers          
• 3rd phase (by June 2018):  Deals and case studies

Team

Sponsor:                                            Manuel Klarmann, CEO

Company project leader:              Jürg Federer, Head of Marketing & Sales