Mountain View to Facebook: no free food
When Facebook moves into its new offices in Mountain View this fall, a signature Silicon Valley perk will be missing — there won’t be a corporate cafeteria with free food for about 2,000 employees.
In an unusual move, the city barred companies from fully subsidizing meals inside the offices, which are part of the Village at San Antonio Center project, in an effort to promote nearby retailers. The project-specific requirement passed in 2014, attracting little notice because the offices were years away from opening.
It came in response to local restaurants that said Google, the city’s biggest employer, was hurting their businesses by providing free meals, according to John McAlister, a Mountain View councilman.
“We wanted to make sure businesses that were there were successful,” McAlister said.
The daily banquets at big tech companies — fresh-made omelets for breakfast, handrolled sushi for lunch, braised chicken and kale for dinner — have become legendary. Goo-
gle hired its first chef about 20 years ago, when the company had just 50 employees. Reviews of its corporate cuisine popped up on Bon Appetit, Serious Eats and Yelp.
New companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn matched the perk as they tried to lure employees away. Staffing the cafeterias became a booming business for the formerly sleepy field of corporate catering. But the in-house eating places have drawn customers and potential employees away from neighboring businesses, and city officials are concerned that local restaurants struggle and potentially bustling streets are empty as a result.
Under Mountain View’s rules for the Village complex, meals within the offices can’t be subsidized by more than 50 percent on a regular basis. Facebook can fully subsidize employees if they go to restaurants that are open to the public.
“It really was geared more around trying to make sure we didn’t have 400,000 square feet of office space with people that never left the building,” said Michael Kasperzak, a former Mountain View mayor who worked on the legislation. “If we have all these restaurants, we want this to be a successful development. If employers pay for it, that’s fine.”
After leaving office, Kasperzak went on to work as a consultant for WeWork, the large New York operator of co-working spaces. Though Facebook is the sole tenant for now, WeWork is managing Facebook’s facility and is considering a public food hall in the ground floor, according to city officials.
WeWork and Facebook declined to comment on the requirement.
“We found the location attractive because of its proximity to public transportation, housing and public-serving amenities like shops and restaurants,” said Facebook spokesman Jamil Walker. Unlike many tech campuses, the Village project is adjacent to a Caltrain station and includes housing.
The absence of an in-house cafeteria will help boost local retailers, said Steve Rasmussen, owner of the Milk Pail Market, a 44-year-old open-air produce market blocks from Facebook’s future office.
“A lot of small, independent restaurants had been impacted when some of these companies went in-house with their food offerings,” Rasmussen said. “I think collaboration is vital, and it makes total sense.”
Rasmussen is in talks with local restaurants to stock ready-to-eat meals at Milk Pail Market, which currently lacks such fare.
“They’re very excited about what can we do to collaborate with the young folks who will come in with Facebook,” he said.
Mountain View has been seeking other concessions from tech giants. A November ballot measure proposes a per-employee tax that would hit Google the hardest. Last year, a new Google campus called Charleston East will be partially open to the public, including restaurants that anyone can dine in.
While the cafeteria provision only applies to the Facebook site, it’s possible Mountain View could seek to impose similar conditions on Google’s next major expansion in the North Bayshore area, where it has its headquarters campus.
Mountain View Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga said it’s possible Google could help subsidize the rent for small businesses on its property or have agreements with retailers to patronize their businesses.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on its North Bayshore plans regarding small businesses.
Abe-Koga said the concept of tech companies offering free food was uncommon 20 years ago, and cities were in favor of companies in business parks having their own cafeterias because it reduced traffic. With projects like Village at San Antonio now featuring a mix of housing, office and retail, getting people outside their offices to frequent nearby businesses is key, she said.
Mountain View’s neighbors don’t have plans to impose similar requirements on employee cafeterias. Cupertino Vice Mayor Rod Sinks said it’s already common to see Apple employees dine at local restaurants; the company charges employees for meals, making outside offerings relatively more attractive. Apple is more concerned with secrecy: It built a glassy restaurant that resembles one of its gadget stores on Alves Drive in Cupertino. A stand-alone building, it’s in walking distance of some Apple offices. Though the building is on a commercial street, the public can’t enter unless they’re the guest of an employee.
In San Jose, there are no prohibitions on businesses offering free food, with the exception of its City Hall. When it was designed more than a decade ago, there were concerns that a cafeteria there would compete with local food businesses, so the city didn’t build one. Adobe’s downtown headquarters has partially subsidized cafeterias.
Near San Jose’s Diridon Station, Google is planning another huge development. There has been no talk of restricting subsidized meals there, said Nanci Klein, San Jose’s assistant director of economic development.
Chris Foley, co-owner of the Market, a food hall underneath Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, hopes that one day the city will follow Mountain View’s lead. Restaurants have opened in the MidMarket neighborhood in hopes of gaining customers from the tech companies there, but a number have shuttered and struggled. If there were no meals served inside those offices, that would greatly benefit restaurants and food vendors like those in the Market, he said.
“Having (tech workers) in their offices and not engaging with the community isn’t really good for the community or these small businesses,” Foley said.
Zendesk, a customer-support software business located a couple of blocks down Market, doesn’t offer free lunch. Instead, CEO Mikkel Svane has recommended employees go to nearby restaurants such as Tu Lan and Farmerbrown. Once a month, the company pays for a group of employees to try a new restaurant, said spokeswoman Courtney Mundell.