Why Catering Keeps Breaking the Integrated FM Model

The logic of Integrated Facilities Management is to fold every soft service into one KPI framework, one CAFM system, one point of accountability.

Cleaning, security, grounds and reception sit inside that logic reasonably well; catering does not, and our benchmarking work keeps landing on the same finding.

Cleaning, security, grounds maintenance and reception are, for IFM purposes, broadly comparable. They are task-based and routine-driven, they can be scheduled against a PPM calendar or a shift pattern, and their quality can be measured largely through compliance and completion; was the task done, on time, to standard. Catering behaves differently on every one of those dimensions, and folding it into a generic soft-FM bundle tends to bury the one service line an organisation can least afford to lose visibility of.

A different kind of service, hiding in a soft-FM bundle

Catering is demand-led, not task-led. Covers served on a Tuesday can vary by a third against the same day the week before, driven by hybrid-working attendance patterns that no fixed schedule can anticipate. It carries its own profit and loss: subsidy arrangements, tariff income, food cost inflation and supply chain volatility that move on a different timetable to the rest of the estate.

The global contract catering market is forecast to grow from roughly $304 billion in 2026 to $476 billion by 2035, a trajectory driven as much by input cost inflation as by volume; numbers that simply don’t show up in a cleanliness audit or a security incident log.

Source: MarkWide Research, Contract Catering Market Forecast 2026–2036.

And its quality is experiential rather than binary. A cleaning task either meets the specification or it doesn’t. A catering offer is judged on taste, choice, value perception and consistency; all of which are real, all of which affect retention and workplace experience, and none of which reduce neatly to a pass/fail compliance score.

What bundling buries

Integration is sold on the promise of reducing interface risk and creating one version of the truth across an estate. That promise holds for services that are genuinely alike. Where it breaks down is when a generic soft-FM KPI framework; response times, cleanliness scores, incident closure rates becomes the primary lens through which catering performance gets reported.

Those metrics were never built to catch a tariff drifting behind market rate, a subsidy model quietly eroding, or a food cost base moving faster than the contract’s review cycle.

Integrating governance does not require flattening measurement. Bundle the relationship. Don’t bundle the reporting.

We’ve written before about rising food costs exposing the real value gap in workplace catering. The structural reason those gaps so often go undetected for months, or longer, is this: inside a bundled soft-FM contract, catering’s commercial reality is rarely isolated enough in the reporting for anyone to see it moving until the subsidy request lands. The sector’s own response confirms the point; demand-led, open-book and digital meal-management models are gaining ground specifically because the generic bundled approach doesn’t give catering’s economics anywhere to be seen.

Interface risk runs both ways

There is a second cost, less discussed than the financial one. When something does go wrong on catering; a quality complaint, a cost overrun, a supply disruption a fully bundled IFM contract can struggle to isolate accountability quickly, because the catering manager typically sits inside a generalist soft-FM structure, and the escalation path runs through someone without the commercial literacy to interrogate a catering P&L.

The interface risk that integration is supposed to remove from the client’s side reappears, quietly, on the supplier’s side instead.

Ring-fence the reporting, keep the relationship

None of this is an argument for pulling catering out of every bundled contract. Where a single accountable partner genuinely reduces friction across an estate, that benefit is real and worth keeping. The fix is narrower and cheaper than unwinding the whole structure.

First, maintain separate open-book reporting for catering; food cost, tariff, subsidy and footfall distinct from the generic soft-FM SLA pack, even where the same provider delivers both.

Second, set KPIs specific to catering’s actual drivers, such as cost per cover, footfall capture rate and tariff-to-market benchmarking, sitting alongside rather than folded into cleanliness and compliance scores.

Third, name a catering-literate reviewer within the governance structure; someone who can read a catering P&L on sight, not only a compliance dashboard.

Fourth, benchmark against external market data on a cycle shorter than the standard contract review, because catering pricing moves faster than most FM review calendars assume.

Integration solves a real governance problem for most of a soft-FM bundle. Catering was never quite the same problem, and measuring it as though it were is how the value gap stays invisible until it’s expensive.

EMC Associates provides catering benchmarking and commercial review services alongside our wider FM consultancy work. This article draws on client benchmarking data across UK workplace and institutional catering contracts.