“Can you order in snacks for our next meeting?” “Do you know if that coffee shop delivers?” “Let’s buy the team lunch!” Sound familiar? Perhaps it’s time to consider office catering.

This blog post will discuss three points:

1. When should you order food to your office?
2. Why is office catering good for your business?
3. What’s so great about office catering?

When you should order food to your office

Did you know that the average American spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime? Now consider that most people eat three meals a day. It’s probably fair to say that every employee eats one if not two meals every workday in the office.

Math-wise, that’s one meal times five days a week for a year (without a vacation) totalling 260 meals. If ten staff members did the same, that’s 2600 opportunities to share a meal and bond as a team—but we’ll get to those benefits soon.

Off the top of my head, here are 13 situations in which you should order office catering:

1. Monday morning meetings are waning and pastries and coffee will help boost morale and productivity.
2. Your team is celebrating a win and has decided to order a family-style lunch.
3. It’s your office’s busy season and everyone is working overtime and need a dinner break.
4. Your company is trying to attract Millennials who like free food at work.
5. Your competitor offers breakfast catering on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and your employees are noticing.
6. Your team is trying to get fit together and have decided to go on a juice cleanse to boost their wellness (and decrease your health insurance payments).
7. It’s Happy Hour Friday and employees today expect free drinks and snacks while they reconnect and unwind before the weekend.
8. Investors are visiting your office and you’d like to host a meeting over lunch—and show that you know how to treat your guests to a great local meal.
9. Your star staff has decided to host monthly lunch & learns and have asked your company to offer lunch catering in return for inspirational education.
10. You’ve accidentally booked an all-Friday-afternoon meeting and would like to treat the attendees to food prizes for listening (and sticking around).
11. It’s party season and you’ve been asked to help organize a holiday office party—food, booze, music, decorations and all.
12. Your office is tired of eating vending-machine snacks and has decided to order in snack catering a few afternoons a week.
13. Your company Town Hall meeting takes place in the early morning and your CEO would like to give away fresh-pressed juices as a thank you for attending.

Why office catering is good for your business

We’ll get to the ‘why office catering’ part in a moment, but for now, let’s discuss why offering free food is important for your business—especially when you’re offering it to a team, group, meeting and/or entire office.

Food is the ultimate connector. Everyone has to eat—as we spoke about earlier—so why not break from routine once in a while and break bread together as a team or company? Eating brown-bagged lunches alone at your desk is okay if you have a tight deadline, but research shows that too many people are spending too much time alone at their desks and not getting enough social or outside time.

In fact, two-thirds of employees eat lunch alone at least three times during the work week. Worse still, 42 percent of working Canadians eat lunch alone every work day. That’s 260 meals alone (and likely more) each year.

Eating together as a team improves communication among colleagues, strengthens relationships, builds trust and camaraderie, increases happiness and job satisfaction and boosts productivity after having a real break. The positive effects of eating together have become so apparent that leading organizations like Google, for example, make it a priority.

By providing food to your employees, your company is not only investing in the benefits of having colleagues eat together but also:

• Encouraging them to take a break from work to recharge
• Providing healthy alternatives to mass-produced foods and unhealthy snacks
• Boosting morale and productivity with something out-of-the-ordinary
• Showing how your company values health and wellness by providing well-balanced meals
• Inserting work-life balance initiatives into your office’s daily routine by encouraging breaks
• Showcasing your company culture and values in working hard and taking breaks

Why office catering is important

You don’t have time to research, stress over, plan, organize, set up, order, serve and clean up a meal for your team or office. But that doesn’t mean it’s not on your plate (or may be soon). You also need to make a great impression on your team, bosses, company and so on, by ordering delicious office catering to your workplace and organizing a successful event.

Where ordering take-out from a restaurant can fall flat is in the details. What time and date do you need your office catering delivered? How many people are you ordering for? Do any of them have allergies or dietary restrictions? Who is your point person if you need to make last-minute changes? Can the restaurant you’ve chosen handle an order of your size in such a tight deadline—and serve it family-style or individually wrapped? Can they guarantee quality, quantity, timeliness and consistency?

That’s where office catering comes in.

Corporate catering companies (like ours) take the stress out of timelines, volume, order details and serving challenges.

Where local food, company culture and office catering meet

Here at Foodee, we only partner with the best, local owner-operated restaurants in cities across North America.

We love to eat great local food and know the best spots in every city (and for every office catering situation). We also get company culture and know what’s best for those important meetings and fun Friday nights. We can make food recommendations, help you with your order and cater to your whole event. Plus, unlike most office catering companies, Foodee aims to use only sustainable and biodegradable packaging and delivery methods—so you can feel good about your company’s footprint.