Food voucher firms turning digital; focus on providing alternate services

Food or e-meal voucher firms such as Sodexo, Ticket Restaurant, Zeta etc. are shunning their paper vouches model and now focusing on digital strategies to wave this technological growth. All the major food voucher firms are targeting 100% digital transactions by replacing the print tickets with prepaid cards which can be exercised at any point of sale (PoS) terminal. Johan Vaucanson, MD Edenred India (which runs Ticket Restaurant mean vouchers) said that “We have various features within our own mobile application promoting merchants through attractive offers, recommend stores for our consumers, also trying to introduce loyalty points and payments within the app. We had started on the digital journey way back in 2014 and 70% of our transaction volume is already on the digital channels.

One factor which is helping the firms gain foothold in the financial services business is their already established client base. Sodexo, for example, has a captive corporate client base of 11,000, Ticket Restaurant has ~3,500 while Zeta has around 800. These companies together serve a consumer base of few million which gives them an automatic head start in the wallet business in terms of scale and quality of customers.

Stephane Michelin, CEO of Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services, said that “We are planning to offer all benefits from meal vouchers to medical benefits from the shelf through one application and intend to migrate all non-digitized clients to the digital platform. Such offerings would never have been possible through paper vouchers”.