Recruiting, retaining, training, and growing teams… In the restaurant industry, HR challenges have never been more strategic. At Food Hotel Tech 2026, Dauphine Piot, Director of Human Resources for France and Belgium at Big Mamma, shared insights from behind the scenes of a group that now employs over 2,700 people across Europe.

Alongside Paul Sauveplane, Secretary General and HR Director at Alan, she detailed how Big Mamma has gradually transformed its approach to workplace health to address two major industry challenges: absenteeism and turnover.

For Dauphine Piot, the challenges are clearly identified.

The first is recruitment. With over 700 hires per year in France alone, attracting new talent remains a daily challenge.

The second is retention. While some turnover is structural in the restaurant industry, other turnover can be prevented through an appropriate HR policy.

The third challenge centers on employee development. At Big Mamma, this involves clearly defined career paths and a strong culture of internal promotion. Each year, nearly 25% of employees move into new roles with greater responsibilities.

Finally, a fourth challenge is becoming increasingly important: the well-being of the teams.

“The restaurant industry is a demanding field, both physically and mentally,” notes the HR Director.

For a long time, workplace health was primarily addressed from an administrative perspective: health insurance, sick leave, and absence management.

Big Mamma has gradually adopted a different approach: intervening before problems arise.

The goal is simple: to reduce risks upstream rather than manage their consequences.

This strategy relies in particular on targeted preventive measures.

Regarding mental health issues, employees have access to psychologists, including in their native language—a particularly important point for a company where nearly 70% of the staff are Italian.

Regarding musculoskeletal disorders, which are particularly common in the restaurant industry, physical therapists visit restaurants directly to educate teams on proper techniques and warm-up exercises before shifts begin.

An approach inspired by elite sports.

“People who work in the restaurant industry are, after all, athletes,” emphasizes Dauphine Piot.

Beyond prevention, the digitization of many HR processes has also allowed teams to refocus on people.

Automating the enrollment of new employees in the health insurance plan alone saves dozens of hours each year.

At Big Mamma, HR teams manage over 700 new hires per year. Thanks to automation, nearly 65 hours of administrative work have been reallocated to higher-value-added tasks.

“Our goal is to be out in the field, not behind a computer,” explains the HR Director.

This approach perfectly illustrates one of the key takeaways from Food Hotel Tech: technology only makes sense when it allows teams to focus on their core business.

In an industry where labor market pressures remain high, health policies are also becoming a key component of employer branding.

At Big Mamma, health-related tools are now presented during the recruitment process as a tangible benefit offered to employees.

The app used by the teams has an adoption rate of over 90%, a particularly remarkable figure in an environment where HR apps often struggle to gain traction.

This popularity is largely due to the service’s user-friendly features: fast reimbursements, access to healthcare professionals, preventive health resources, and personalized support.

For Dauphine Piot, the fight against absenteeism cannot be limited to tools alone.

The real key lies in team engagement.

The more employees identify with the company, the more supported and valued they feel, and the less likely they are to take avoidable absences.

This approach leads Big Mamma to closely monitor HR metrics and hold managers accountable for the real costs of turnover and absenteeism.

Because behind every last-minute absence lie immediate operational impacts: overburdening of the teams on site, reliance on temporary staff, disruption of services, and rising costs.

One of the most striking messages from this conference is undoubtedly this: health should no longer be viewed as a cost center.

Operational performance, because it helps reduce absenteeism. Economic performance, because it limits employee turnover. Human performance, because it improves the employee experience.

At a time when the hospitality industry is facing unprecedented recruitment challenges, the ability to take care of one’s teams appears more than ever to be a key differentiator.

And behind the scenes at Big Mamma, this conviction now seems firmly established.