The most innovative corporate cafeterias

By Tim Catts

updated 4:35 p.m. ET Aug. 29, 2007

For many workers, the company cafeteria offers all the appeal of airline or hospital food — assuming, of course, you're not left dining from a vending machine. However, even in this era of rigorous corporate penny-pinching and wolf-a-sandwich-at-your-desk deadlines, some worker-diners enjoy a different mealtime experience.

Think organic produce, locally sourced foods, thoughtful chefs. In fact, some companies now consider lunch a crucial component of employee recruitment, reward, and quality of life. Moreover, healthful food can help keep employees healthy, which not only boosts productivity but may help curb a company's health-care expenses.

Quality on-site options
There's Google, of course. Sometimes it seems every story about the Internet behemoth has an obligatory reference to the free meals it feeds its workforce. Google's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters — dubbed the Googleplex — boasts 15 cafeterias, each with its own theme and menu. Options range from regional American cuisine to tapas to dishes emphasizing locally grown ingredients. The food is so tasty, and the service so innovative, that Food Management magazine, a trade journal, awarded the company its "Best of Show" distinction for 2007.

Google is far from alone among tech firms in offering employees innovative dining options. Microsoft boasts 26 cafés at its main Redmond, Wash. campus, with several more slated to open this year and next — and that's not counting the pantries scattered throughout the buildings and the more than two dozen coffee stands.

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But it's not just workers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs who enjoy the benefits of good grub on the job. Plenty of companies in a variety of businesses in every corner of the country offer meals on site. The menus are diverse, and so are the reasons for offering food service. Some employers cite productivity as their prime consideration; when employees eat in the company's cafeteria, they save time they would have spent foraging at nearby fast-food chains and delis. "I want people to be well-fed and satisfied," Michael Bloomberg, the current New York mayor and former chief executive of Bloomberg, the financial data business he founded in 1981, told Fast Company magazine in a 1995 interview. "I want them to be able to grab a cup of coffee with a colleague and hash things out. But most of all I want them to stay here. I don't want them leaving."

Over to the outsourcers
Still, no matter what business justification a company cites, there's no way to spin quality. "The old cafeteria model doesn't work anymore," says Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a Chicago-based consulting firm that serves the food industry. Employees expect their company's café to be at least as good as what they'd get at an independent eatery. "The bottom line is, you're in the restaurant business," Paul says.

To be sure, feeding employees can be expensive, and that's especially true for companies wanting to surpass typical cafeteria fare. The vast majority of employers offer little more than a vending machine, preferring to spend their money elsewhere: salaries and benefits, capital investment, dividends, and the like. And there are other challenges beyond footing the bill. Feeding the same group of people day after day for years on end can challenge even the most talented chef, for example, and some employees are bound to get bored with their company's menu, no matter how innovative it may be.

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Seeking to take advantage of economies of scale, most companies that want to provide an in-house dining option look to outsource its operation to one of several food-service heavyweights, including the Compass Group, Sodexho, and Aramark. For example, when Cisco Systems started offering employee dining as a benefit in the mid-1990s, it turned to Bon Appetit Management, a division of Britain-based food-service giant Compass Group. One of the main factors behind the decision: Bon Appetit's focus on buying ingredients from local farmers who embrace environmentally sustainable practices. "One of the primary reasons we've chosen Bon Appetit is that it's in line with our commitment to corporate social responsibility," says Christi Cheng, program manager for Cisco's workplace resources group. "Also, they have really great food."

Promoting wellness
Two interesting aspects of what Cisco is doing: You don't have to work at the tech giant's San Jose headquarters to enjoy the company's investment in a karma-boosting lunch. Eight Cisco campuses across the country feature cafeterias. At the company's offices in North Carolina's Research Triangle, for example, employees have options ranging from pizza and comfort foods (think meat loaf and fried chicken) to Hemispheres, a station featuring prepared-to-order world cuisine, and a fresh salad bar where "the beans are the only thing from a can," says Rich Backstrom, Bon Appetit's on-site manager.

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