EDIBLE PERKS
No such thing as a free lunch? At some workplaces, there is
The cafeteria menu at Covermymeds is a far cry from the sorry desk lunches of many American office workers.
Last week, options included ancho chile-dusted salmon, barbacoa beef and berbere chicken. Vegans and vegetarians could opt for vegetable gnocchi soup, black-bean tacos or berbere zucchini. And all of it was free. The health-care software company, which has served lunch free to employees since 2010, also offers snacks and a light breakfast at its Columbus office Downtown as well as its Cleveland office.
The company’s culinary Berbere chicken was a recent lunch entree at Columbus-based Covermymeds, which feeds its employees free.
team serves more than 4,000 lunches each week at the two offices, company officials said.
“I think one of the core tenets of this organization is we want to give employees more than they expect from us,” said Veronica Knuth, vice president of talent. “We do want them to feel special and valued.”
Free food has been a formidable presence in the American workplace since the 1990s, when Bloomberg and tech startups such as Google began to put out snacks in hopes of making employees happier or healthier, more productive and less likely to stray far from the task at hand.
Nowadays, even more businesses go to extraordinary lengths to provide food without charge or at a sharp discount.
The offerings have grown in size, scope and specificity — some tailored to a company’s mission, others unwittingly reflective of it and still others that seem oddly random.
Everyone who works at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, for example, is entitled to three free pints of ice cream for each day of work.
At the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., employees are treated daily to an elaborate buffet with appropriately white-shoe fare such as prime rib, crabcakes and housemade beignets.
And at the offices of the Perkins Eastman architecture firm, with locations on three continents, staff members can enjoy all manner of free snacks — just as long as they are orange, the color of the company’s logo.
In New York, that means a lot of Cheetos, Goldfish and Nacho Cheese Doritos.
There are workplaces where the food gifts even have a competitive feel. Zappos, the online shoe retailer, holds periodic eating contests in its main plaza in Las Vegas. More than 300 employees show up to cheer.
At Big Ass Fans, a fan producer in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a beer refrigerator that is unlocked only if the day’s sales goals have been met.
“We’ll walk through other departments, and they will ask: ‘How close are we? Are we going to hit it?”’ said John Nunnelley, 29, who works in sales.
Fidelity, the financialservices company, also dangles food as an incentive. The items aren’t free but can come with a significant price break, determined by its perceived healthfulness.
A grilled Buffalo chicken wrap, for example, might be half the price of the breaded and fried version.
A spokeswoman said the strategy has been successful: Nearly two-thirds of the food items bought every month are what the company deems healthy, a 140 percent increase since the program was introduced in 2012.
Many food businesses offer employees only their own products.
Rachel Drori, 36, founder of the subscription fooddelivery company Daily Harvest, said that filling the office refrigerators with free Daily Harvest smoothies and soups is a convenient way to gauge the popularity of new items.
“We just launched a kelp pad thai, and yesterday we didn’t have enough for everybody,” Drori said. “It was anarchy.”
Root Insurance, a Columbus-based automobile-insurance startup that sets rates based on driving ability, uses local caterer Bentos Lunch to feed its 260 employees four days a week. The lunches, available between noon and 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday, are often vegetable-heavy (salads are omnipresent) and include options for vegans and vegetarians.
Clara Kridler, Root’s vice president of people, said the company has offered meals since she became its 15th employee two years ago.
“The biggest thing is reducing their friction and barriers to coming to work (so they can) focus on the things that are most impactful, and us as an employer taking responsibility for all the details outside of that,” she said.
Some company food policies have drawn mixed reviews.
In July, a media uproar ensued after the sharedworkspace company Wework announced that it would no longer serve meat at its offices and events, and wouldn’t let employees expense meals that included red meat, poultry or pork.
A similar policy proved untenable at Google; after the company tried to establish meatless Mondays at its cafeterias in 2010, employees rebelled by tossing out silverware and holding protest barbecues.
At the companies that do give freebies, there are countless challenges for the people charged with producing them.
Tilak Gurung, 49, who was a chef at Dropbox’s San Francisco headquarters from 2012 to 2017, said he wasn’t allowed to repeat the same menu twice.
Corporate kitchens also have to deal with “skyrocketing” dietary restrictions and highly critical consumers, said Amelia Ekus, 29, a manager for New York and New Jersey at the corporate food supplier Guckenheimer, and formerly a general manager of the cafeteria in Twitter’s New York offices.
“With restaurants, people vote with their wallets,” she said. But when the office cafeteria is the only food option, “if they don’t like what you do, they will tell you every day how they think you should get better.”
Still, Ekus added, she understands why companies are going all in on food: Compared with other benefits, it’s a small investment, “and the return on the investment is huge,” she said. “You reduce turnover because you have happier employees. It’s how you stay competitive for a certain sector of companies.”