OpenLobby.EU
Explore

FoodServiceEurope

FoodServiceEurope

FoodServiceEurope is the voice of the contract catering sector in Europe, bringing together contract catering organisations in Europe and speaking on behalf of a significant share of the market.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Valentina Schaumburger (Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné) and UNI Europa and

11 Sept 2025 · Public procurement of labor-intensive services in the view of the coming public procurement reform

Meeting with Pierre Jouvet (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur)

28 Mar 2025 · marchés publics

Meeting with Piotr Müller (Member of the European Parliament, Rapporteur) and Fondazione Think Tank ECCO ETS

27 Mar 2025 · Evaluation of the Public Procurement Directives

Meeting with Roberto Berutti (Cabinet of Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski) and EuroCommerce and

12 Apr 2024 · Meeting to present the research on food waste management

Response to Revision of EU rules on late payments (Late Payments Directive)

9 Nov 2023

FoodServiceEurope welcomes the opportunity to provide our preliminary comments on the Commission proposal for a Regulation revising the existing Directive on late payments. Contract catering companies continue to be subjected to late payments in particular by national and local public authorities. While the situation diverges substantially across Member States, in national markets payment terms from public authorities can reach up to 200 days, creating serious burdens in terms of cash flow for catering companies which must pay suppliers in time. In addition, this needs to be done without compromising the quality of the service and the meals provided to the final users, who often belong to vulnerable groups, such as children in schools, the elderly in retirement homes, patients in hospitals and people in prisons. The option of terminating a service provision for undue late payments is thus in many cases not even available to the companies that may be bound by public service obligations. Kindly see our position paper for our suggestions.
Read full response

Response to Sustainable food system – setting up an EU framework

25 Oct 2021

FoodServiceEurope represents the European contract catering sector. Contract catering encompasses food and ancillary services provided to people working or living in communities – private and public undertakings, schools, universities, hospitals, retirement homes, prisons – under the terms of a contract with the client communities. FoodServiceEurope fully supports the Commission’s objective to build more sustainable food systems and welcomes the European Commission’s initial consultation on a related framework initiative. Please see attached our full response to the consultation.
Read full response

Response to Setting of nutrient profiles

2 Feb 2021

The contract catering industry welcomes the opportunity to provide comments on the Inception Impact Assessment (IIA) on the Proposal for a revision of Regulation 1169/2011 on the provision of food information to consumers (FIC Regulation). FoodServiceEurope very much agrees that an informed consumer is an empowered consumer who can make healthier and more sustainable choices. Contract catering operators are committed to providing customers with healthy and increasingly sustainable meals and are very much willing to leverage the direct contact with consumers to help bring change in the right direction. To that end, and for our sector, however we believe the current legislative framework is adequate and provides the needed flexibility, that can be adapted to national circumstances. We therefore would not support the full re-opening of the FIC regulation and would urge the Commission to make sure this is explicitly acknowledged in the legislative proposal and that the legal instruments that will be chosen to take this reform forward can help focus the discussion of the co-legislators on the relevant issues. We very much welcome that the current improvements being considered are not meant to change the scope of application of the Food Information to Consumers Regulation but call on the Commission to make this explicit. This is already acknowledged in the IIA for front-of-pack nutrition labelling and nutrient profiles, but not as clearly mentioned for origin labelling or date marking, and we believe this should also be the case. Please see the brief document attached for additional details on our position.
Read full response

Response to Initiative to improve the Food Supply Chain

12 Jun 2018

FoodServiceEurope believes that fostering fair contractual relations amongst all actors in the supply chain is essential to provide high-quality, safe, and affordable food to consumers. Therefore, the contract catering sector supports balanced initiatives to strengthen the position of farmers and SMEs in the food supply chain. However, any initiative at EU level has to be justified and proportionate in order to achieve this stated objective. The Commission’s proposal for a Directive to address unfair trading practices in the food supply chain does not sufficiently consider the specificities of the contract catering sector and its unique position in the food supply chain. In particular: (i) The prohibition for buyers to agree with their suppliers on payment terms of more than 30 days for perishable products would be disproportionately burdensome for contract catering operators, who do not enjoy equivalent protection in respect of their clients. Clients, especially public-sector entities, often operate on much longer payment terms and rarely on 30 days. This means operators in the contract catering sector would be unfairly squeezed between their buyers, often public authorities outsourcing catering services, and their suppliers. Operators in the food supply chain should thus be able to retain the possibility to agree on longer payment terms, adapting contracts to the concrete realities of the market. (ii) In addition, for the proposal to reflect the legislator’s intent, the definition of "perishable food products” should be limited to fresh food products and food products with a short shelf-life. (iii) The proposal does not expressly cover public authorities that buy food products to provide services equivalent to those performed by private sector contract catering operators. This would potentially create an additional distortion to competition in the market. This needs to be addressed, either through the unambiguous inclusion of public authorities within the scope of the Directive or through the exclusion of contract catering services overall from the entire scope of the proposal. (iv) If contract catering companies are to be covered by the scope of the directive when they act as buyers, this should also be the case when they are suppliers in order for the directive to cover the food supply chain in its entirety. We thus call to extend the scope of the proposal to cover also the provision of food services in business-to-business relations.
Read full response

Response to Commission Reg. (EU) on the application of control & mitigation measures to reduce the presence of acrylamide in food

6 Jul 2017

FoodServiceEurope represents the interests of the European contract catering sector. We welcome the opportunity to comment on this proposal and very much support the approach that has been taken by the European Commission. We believe, however, that there are various elements that require additional clarification and need to be improved in order for the proposal to fully meet its objectives, as briefly outlined below and developed in the attached file. 1. The scope of the Regulation focuses on production processes and should therefore not include a mention to the mere placing on the market (Article 1). To the extent the Regulation is meant to impose an obligation on food business operators to apply mitigation measures in the preparation of certain foodstuffs, the scope of application of the Regulation should not refer to the placing on the market of products for which the production process is not under the control of the business operator. While the General Food Law and the Regulation on the hygiene of foodstuffs impose an obligation on food business operators across the food chain to ensure that the relevant hygiene requirements are met, they also recognise this is to be imposed to the extent the supply stage to which the measures apply is under the control of the individual food business operator. 2.Contract catering operations are not standardized food services and should only fall under Article 2(2) For the reasons outlined in the attached file, FoodServiceEurope is of the view that operations in our sector should only fall under the scope of Article 2(2) and be required to apply the mitigation measures that are defined in Part A of Annex II. The wording of article 2(3), however, is too broad and could inadvertedly be considered as applicable to contract catering operators. This would entail additional obligations for contract catering operators that would be inadequate or excessively onerous,bearing in mind in particular that production in our sector is not standardized, the menus change every day and operations are frequently conducted by small teams in the facilities of the client organization. See the attached file for additional details. FoodServiceEurope therefore proposes that the wording of Article 2(3) more adequately reflects the operators that are targeted by the additional obligations and proposes an alternative wording in the attached document. In addition, FoodServiceEurope would welcome that the regulation is also accompanied by more detailed guidance for enforcement authorities in order to ensure a common understanding of the scope of these provisions and the operators to which article 2(2) and 2(3) will apply. Such guidance should help clarify that contract catering operations would not fall under Article 2 (3).
Read full response

Meeting with Maria Elena Scoppio (Cabinet of Commissioner Pierre Moscovici)

19 Oct 2015 · TVA pour le secteur public