Ekip combines restaurant vouchers and eco-responsibility

As CSR becomes a major concern for companies, the startup Ekip offers companies the opportunity to accelerate this transition with an eco-responsible meal voucher.

FACTS 

• Ekip meal vouchers can be used at 220,000 reference partners and have a special benefit for employees: 

  • Users will be rewarded when they make purchases at one of the 3,500 restaurants or food companies referenced by Ekip.

  • On average, 10% of the purchase price will be paid back when using the meal voucher in an eco-responsible partner store, such as Café Joyeux, Day by Day or Biocoop.

• The addresses that Ekip chooses to use are often already labeled Ecotable or FiG.

• About twenty French companies have implemented Ekip meal vouchers for their employees who use the application to find restaurants and grocery stores nearby.

• At the same time, the human resources department has a SAS dashboard to manage the issuance and addition of meal vouchers.

• Physical cards are optional, with the aim of creating CSR policies without creating new waste.

CHALLENGES 

• The food market, a market to be decarbonized : according to Ekip, food represents 24% of France's CO2 emissions. Based on this observation, the founder of Ekip (Julien Derville) created Ekip in August 2020.

• Federating employees through common values to create a true corporate culture : Ekip wants to give meaning to this social benefit (meal voucher) granted to its employees. CSR policies are increasingly contributing to a company's image and its ability to attract and retain talent. The company's values can even take precedence over salaries.

• Rewarding employees to encourage them to change their consumption habits : eating well usually costs a little more. That's why Ekip rewards employees for favoring eco-responsible restaurants in order to change their employees' consumption habits.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE 

• Ekip plans to raise capital in order to grow, with an estimated one million euros raised by the end of 2023. Ekip has also set a target of 2,500 employee users by the end of the year, but they are not excluding local authorities and associations that could also provide this social benefit to their employees.

• Following several controversies about greenwashing, CSR and environmental sustainability measures are becoming more and more central to companies' business models. For example, Doconomy recently announced the acquisition of the fintech Dreams Technology, notably to allow Doconomy, used by Mastercard, to complete its offer with a suite of solutions based on behavioral finance.

• Other examples in the e-commerce sector:

  • The impact cashback offering provided by MiiMOSA, a financial platform focused on agriculture and food. It is a web extension that allows citizens to easily contribute to the financing of agricultural transformation by purchasing online from 500 partner merchants.

  • Or Clarity AI, a technology platform that has partnered with fintech Klarna to promote green brands to Klarna shoppers. Using data provided by Clarity, Klarna gives users a complete picture of their favorite brands' social commitments to help them consume more responsibly.