Aramark

Aramark is the contract-food-and-facilities company that feeds schools, hospitals, stadiums, offices, and other places where the menu is part of a bigger operation. By our assessment, its real strength is scale: it can run cafeterias, catering, cleaning, and support services across very different sites, which is harder than it sounds when the customer wants the same routine to work every day. The downside is that contract services are often invisible until they go wrong, so the brand rarely gets the kind of attention a consumer restaurant chain would. In practice Aramark is logistics, staffing, and standardisation, with food service only one piece of the machine. It sits alongside other large outsourced-services firms rather than in the restaurant world proper, and it matters most to institutions that want one operator to handle a lot of daily basics.