Bay Area Office Meal Delivery Service: A Smart Corporate Lunch Solution for Today’s Workplace

People have always liked food.

And why not? Food is amazing. It’s filling. It’s tasty. It can give you the burst of energy necessary to get through your next task. Everyone loves food, and for decades, smart businesses have realized that food can be a perk unto itself. Big companies used to add entire cafeterias to their buildings so they could keep employees fed and on-campus; heck we still hear stories about certain cafeterias in Menlo Park and Mountain View. 

The pandemic and the ensuing rush for remote work severely curtailed the idea of the office restaurant. WIth more and more Bay Area companies implementing RTOs and hybrid scheduling, though, food itself is back on the menu. Employees still want to eat. Businesses still want to feed them. A cafeteria might not be a cost-effective idea anymore — particularly if you don’t know who will be showing up in the office each day — but what about an office meal delivery service?

If your ears perked up at that phrase, this is your lucky day. 

WHY BAY AREA COMPANIES ARE TURNING TO FOOD DELIVERY SERVICES

Wait, you might be saying, so are workplace cafeterias done?

Well…yes and no.

There’s no question the pandemic did the company cafeteria a lot of harm, but in reality the conversation about cafeterias and the problems around them had been going on for some years prior to that. An on-site cafeteria is expensive: the company must foot the bill for staffing and cooking equipment, along with ingredients and maintenance, and in the era of hybrid work it’s more difficult to gauge how many people will be in the office at any one time. That leads to wasted food.

Combine those costs with the generally high costs of just leasing enough space to run a cafeteria in this region, and you’ve got a rapidly dwindling ROI. 

But while cafeterias may be on their way out, food itself is not. 

There’s a lot of competition for talent in the Bay Area, particularly in the tech and biotech industries. Businesses want to attract and retain top performers, and often stack offer packages with considerable benefits. Most people figure that equates to PTO and nice health insurance. 

But people love food, and employees love being fed. Seriously, numerous studies report employees feel more valued and more positive about their workplaces if they’re provided with food. If handled properly, feeding your people can turn into a powerful retention method.  

A meal delivery service — or any kind of subsidized meals — is particularly attractive in the Bay Area thanks to its famously high cost of living (since when was San Jose more expensive to survive in than NYC?!). When a good portion of your salary goes toward rent, you’ll be looking for other areas to trim. Often the food budget is the first thing to take a hit, whether it’s a reduction in eating out or grocery lists that are based on “what I can add to ramen” (answer: everything).

So offering meals is a draw unto itself. Add to that the idea that employees can bond over community lunches (or that spirits lift in general when a long meeting is catered) and you’ve got a recipe for higher morale.

Corporate meal delivery can also help address a pain point that has accompanied a return to the road: traffic. 

Even the most time-conscious employees can run into traffic. Road work on El Camino Real or a fender-bender on 101 can stretch what should have been a half-hour lunch pickup into 1.5 hours or more. By the time the employee gets back into the office, they have to go straight back to work and their food is cold. They’re in a mood. 

No bueno, as the saying goes. 

Solution: Bring the food to them!

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A BAY AREA MEAL DELIVERY SERVICE

So, you’re ready to look into corporate meal delivery programs. Personally, we hope you’ll consider us for the job, but here are some characteristics you should look for in any service. 

Menu variety and dietary flexibility

Look, ramen is delightful. In fact, it is amazing. It is one of our favorite dishes, whether we get it at a restaurant or make it straight out of the package like we did in the dorms. If you want to eat ramen all day, every day, that is entirely your prerogative. 

But you do want other options, right?

Your employees probably do. On top of their own tastes, they also probably have some dietary requirements or restrictions. Vegans, vegetarians, and gluten-free coworkers walk among us, along with those who follow the paleo diet, keep kosher or halal, or avoid nuts and/or dairy. Ordering for even a handful of people can become difficult if they’ve all got different dietary requirements; ordering for an office of dozens can quickly get…well…complicated. 

Fortunately, the Bay Area is filled with interesting cuisine from all over the world. Team up with an office meal delivery service that can bring their amazing food to you.

Reliability

There’s no question that traffic has gotten worse over the years. If something happens on the 205, the lunch commute can end up turning into an all-day affair. No delivery service can control for all the variables associated with traffic, but you’ll want to team up with one that ships its meals in temperature-controlled packaging to keep the meals inside warm or cool no matter how long they’re stuck in traffic. 

You also want your delivery partner to take care of its own people. A lot of food delivery platforms operate on the backs of independent contractors, and food delivery is their second, third, or fourth gig. They deliver food when they can. There are no guaranteed hours. Their delivery performance may match their frenetic hours. 

Waiter’s drivers are salaried and have benefits, and delivering food is what they do. When we say something will be there, it will be there. 

The ordering experience

It’s the twenty-first century, and your colleagues expect (and frankly deserve) a smooth meal ordering process. Look for a service with an intuitive, easy-to-navigate design. You should also look for features that make your life easier: a dashboard for budgeting, for example, and filters for dietary tracking. You can also set up recurring orders and track delivery progress, as well as adjust preferences for everyone on your order. 

It’s not quite ordering telepathically, but it’s as close as we can get with current technology. 

Sustainability

There’s no getting around the fact that the modern world produces a lot of waste. Your office lunch delivery should take that into consideration and do what it can to minimize its own waste generation: eco-friendly, biodegradable packaging, for instance, or partnerships with restaurants that buy from Bay Area vendors and align with our values. 

Budget planning

Inevitably the question will come up: “What’s all this going to cost?” Pricing will come down to what your business can bear and what your office meal delivery service will offer. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Are you fully paying for meals, or subsidizing employees so they can buy their own?
• How often will you be bringing in meals?
• Can you set up a subscription that brings a certain number of meals per day/week/month?
• Are potential add-ons like desserts, substitutions, and beverages included?
• Based on the answers to the questions above, what does your per-meal pricing work out to?
• What are the benefits you hope to gain from bringing in food?
  • Employees feel valued and retention increases?
  • Employees spend more time on campus and less time in line or driving to a restaurant?
    • What is the financial value of their lost time?

HOW TO IMPLEMENT AN OFFICE MEAL DELIVERY SYSTEM

Start forecasting

Before anything else, find out who wants to participate. While we think everyone will be pleased to get delicious lunches brought to them, the fact of the matter is that not every employee is going to want to be involved. 

If you have a hybrid workforce, start tracking in-office days, headcount patterns, and meeting schedules. 

Launch a pilot program

Commitments are a big (and often expensive) deal; why not stick a toe in first, and see if you even like it? Start a pilot program that brings in lunches once or twice a week. You could even select a particular regular meeting that could benefit from some carbs and get them catered first. (Or, you know, Waiter has a service just for this kind of testing period.) 

Once the pilot program is in place, make sure you get feedback from participants. Ask them:

• Did they like the meals?
• Was the food consistently good across multiple deliveries?
• How does it compare to what they normally do for lunch?
• Would they want to keep this program long-term?
• Did people with dietary restrictions feel included and good about their options?
• How easy was it to order through the service or app?
• Was there any friction with timing, reminders, or meal delivery?
• Were the meals on time and correctly labeled?
• Did having the meals improve productivity and/or collaboration?
• Did people stay on-site more?
• Did it ease the stress of figuring out lunch?

Communicate the program internally

Assuming your pilot program goes well, you can either make it permanent or roll out additional options. How you alert your colleagues to the program is up to you; we’ve always found that emails are a good place to start, along with announcements in company chats. You might even put up a flyer in the kitchen or communal areas.

Optimize, optimize, optimize

The needs of your company will change over time, and your meal delivery service should be able to change with them. 

Which teams participate more? Maybe catering is a slam-dunk with the engineering team, but not the sales team, which is constantly out on the road. User dashboards can also provide a look at what restaurants, cuisine types, and add-ons are most popular with your colleagues, and which they’re ignoring. Add consistent top performers to a regular restaurant rotation. 

You can also track high-attendance days in both your office and throughout the rest of the Bay Area. Why is this important? Traffic will be heavier. You may want to spare your colleagues the trek to find food and bring it in on the days that are the highest. You may want to bring in more food during meeting-heavy weeks and scale down during the holiday season, when many colleagues are taking time off. 

Let Waiter help

You don’t have to stitch together a delivery service on your own. The Waiter team pretty much invented corporate meal delivery way back in 1995. We’ve got literal decades of experience in bringing food to businesses, and we also happen to know the Bay Area and Silicon Valley pretty well. 

We also do just about everything we told you to look for in the article above. Yeah, yeah, it’s true: we were talking about ourselves. But we only do that because we can provide your team with the grub it needs and deserves.

Are you looking for a regular meal subscription service? We can do that.

Want to just give our service a try and see how your staff likes it? We can do that too.

Get in touch. We’d love to get your team fed.