“Four & Five did everything they could to understand the operational side of the business cases as well”

Today, The Foodmaker has twelve restaurants in Belgium, the Netherlands and France and supplies ultra-fresh healthy meals through strategic partners, both nationally and internationally. For legal advice in the latter, the company has been calling on the know-how and legal expertise of Four & Five for several years now. “Especially during the last eighteen months, the collaboration has really intensified”, says Muriel Van den Bergh, sales manager at The Foodmaker. “More so because we wanted to deepen our strategic partnerships: we wanted to work with the retailers in the long term. It is not always very straightforward to come to agreements in this industry, so these partnership agreements had to be extremely well thought out.

“Therefore, we worked together with Four & Five to draw up sustainable partnership agreements, instead of the classic purchase and sales agreements that focus purely on price and product and often only apply for one year. The firm has guided us throughout that entire process, in which we drew up a number of fundamental principles and Tessa Gijbels and Pauline Devos in particular created a suitable legal framework based on those principles.”

“Therefore, Four & Five was a genuine partner in this entire story: they thought along very well from the start and did everything they could to understand the operational side of the business cases in question as well. They made the necessary operational links and proposed suggestions – which I found very remarkable for a law firm, and I mean this in a positive way. In any case, we are extremely satisfied with the collaboration, and I would also like to emphasise the speed with which they operate: where most other law firms put you on a fixed schedule after posing a question and whereby you receive an answer after a week, we always received a response to simple questions within two days or within 24 hours we received an estimated time regarding when to expect an answer to more complex questions. All of this made our collaboration a very efficient and pleasant experience.”

Muriel Van den Bergh (Sales Manager The Foodmaker)