“Lunch Garden will file for bankruptcy”, special works council (Domestic) on Monday

It was announced on Friday evening that a special works council will take place on Monday at the Lunch Garden headquarters in Evere. The subject is “an update on the current situation”. The Christian trade union ACV Food and Services said it expected bad news. The meeting starts on Monday at 8:30 am.

According to Litter Lunch Garden will file for bankruptcy before the Brussels corporate court early next week. This would be followed by a partial takeover by CIM Capital, which specializes in restructuring files. Jobs will also be lost.

Anyone who enters a Lunch Garden now often sees – as the cliché goes – seniors sitting there. A slightly older audience with time that first eats a ham roll and then leisurely orders a coffee with apple crumble.

Lunch Garden has been in trouble for some time now. The chain, which has about sixty restaurants, has undergone restructuring in recent years. At the end of 2023, more than 800 people still worked at the company, compared to 1,100 in 2020.

In June last year, Ann Biebuyck was dismissed, who took over as CEO of Lunch Garden four years earlier, and was succeeded by financial director Stephan Brouwers. Biebuyck took over the helm of the chain in 2020 in the midst of the corona crisis, after the dismissal of the experienced Annick Van Overstraeten. Corona weighed heavily on the group’s results, with two long periods of complete closure.

The restaurant chain then announced a transformation plan, which put 138 of the then approximately 1,100 jobs at risk. The equity of Lunch Garden, with 64 branches in Belgium, was 36 million in the red at the end of 2022, and the group had a debt burden of 74 million euros. In 2023, the company had 77 million euros in debt.