After my experience at Google I'd recommend that any company of sufficient size provide tasty convenient lunch for free. It's a huge productivity boost. At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch, order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.
Dinner and breakfast aren't as useful to provide and I don't think comparatively many Googlers take advantage of them (though breakfast is nice if you have a very long commute.) I did when I was young and single, but no longer. However, I'm virtually certain that providing lunch is a very cost effective way of getting more work done and is a win/win for everyone.
I seem to recall the budget at Google for food service was $15 per person per meal. And the snacks and drinks in the micro-kitchens cost something like $5 per day; they used to cost more, but they also used to be a lot better.
Of course, Google provides really elaborate meals. You could probably get the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it would mean fast-food-grade meals.
> I seem to recall the budget at Google for food service
> was $15 per person per meal ...You could probably get
> the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it
> would mean fast-food-grade meals.
If the $15/meal figure is accurate and includes all expenses related to serving the meals (incl. paying kitchen staff and everything) then the food would only be a fraction of those costs. Going from serving fresh food to serving the cheapest possible garbage might only take the cost from $15 down to $10 or something like that.
"At Intel lunch had a different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel, because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did."
Surely well below $10 per person for that level of service. :-)
> At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and
> a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch,
> order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive
> back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.
Yes. I've seen this so many times.
Even in an ideal, imaginary office where everybody's super-efficient about lunch choices... having a great lunch area + choices under one roof means everybody's more likely to eat together.
The point of employee-provided lunch is that your employees don't have to think about taking care of food. No packed lunches, no going out to eat. High quality, delicious food is at the office so that it's one less thing to take care of for your engineers.
Dinner and breakfast aren't as useful to provide and I don't think comparatively many Googlers take advantage of them (though breakfast is nice if you have a very long commute.) I did when I was young and single, but no longer. However, I'm virtually certain that providing lunch is a very cost effective way of getting more work done and is a win/win for everyone.