Why Every Business Needs a Company Cafeteria Plan
Having a cafeteria plan regardless of the size of your business can help staff and businesses simultaneously. Providing nutritious meals for employees isn’t just a nice treat or a way to say “thank you”, it’s an investment in the health and longevity of your business. Company cafeteria plans enhance employee satisfaction, but if utilized correctly, they can also increase productivity and staff’s overall health and wellness.
If valuing and investing in your staff is part of your company culture, a company cafeteria plan should be an easy choice. You’ll be enhancing your workplace culture through action, proving that your company is committed to giving employees a positive experience. Meeting their dietary needs can lead to a better quality of life and overall health, something that has incalculable worth.
We’ll go over an in-depth analysis of how implementing something as simple as a cafeteria plan for your company can have a ripple effect on your company overall.
What Is a Company Cafeteria Plan?
Definition and Purpose
A company cafeteria plan is a structured meal program for employees that might include on-site dining, meal delivery, or pre-packaged lunches. The purpose of a company cafeteria plan is to improve workplace efficiency, encourage collaboration in a shared space, and boost morale. This isn’t an exhaustive list of all the potential additional benefits you can get out of a meal plan, however. Depending on how you execute your cafeteria plan, the possibilities are limitless.
Key Benefits of a Company Cafeteria Plan
There are overarching benefits for every type of cafeteria plan.
- Improves Productivity: Your employees will spend less time leaving the office during lunchtime to get food. They’ll also have an easier time eating, leading to less meal skipping or fast eating. Having a proper meal helps with cognitive function and less “hangry” employees.
- Encourages Healthy Eating: Cafeteria plans can support wellness programs with nutritious options. If you strategically serve food that’s healthy and tastes good, you bring vital nutrients to staff, allowing their bodies and minds to work better. You might even introduce someone to their new favorite healthy meal, encouraging them to have healthy foods more consistently.
- Builds Community: With a cafeteria plan, you can promote collaboration and networking during breaks. Employees have more time to relax and get to know each other without rushing out of the office to get a quick lunch. Offering food attracts a variety of people in various departments to come together and share a meal.
- Attracts Top Talent: You can demonstrate your company’s focus on employee well-being. As we mentioned before, if you’re putting employees first at your company, you should make sure you’re following that up with actions. Your future employees and talent pools will notice your commitment, making your company an attractive place to work.
Types of Company Cafeteria Plans
Not every company has the same needs. Company cafeteria plans are easy to customize based on your business’s size and volume.
On-Site Cafeteria Services
On-site cafeterias are ideal for large organizations with many employees. They’re generally fully staffed, buffet-style cafeterias that serve fresh food daily and have snacks available to purchase. If your company has frequent dining needs because you have a large group taking lunches at various times, this is perfect for you.
Subsidized Meal Programs
If you’re a medium-sized company and in need of a budget-friendly option, subsidized meal programs can help you partially pay for your employee’s meals. This allows you to provide meals for your staff at a discounted rate.
Meal Delivery and Catering Partnerships
Hybrid teams have become increasingly popular since the start of the pandemic. If you’re looking for an option that suits hybrid teams or small businesses with no on-site kitchens, partnering with a meal delivery service is a great way to accommodate everyone. You can also partner with local vendors for prepackaged grab-and-go meals.
Flexible Meal Allowances and Stipends
To accommodate everyone, you can offer meal allowances and stipends on a meal card or through a reimbursement program. This allows employees to buy their preferred food, which is especially good for inclusive dining. People with dietary restrictions or allergies now have the freedom to buy the food they want instead of navigating premade foods or a limited food delivery app.
Features to Include in a Company Cafeteria Plan
Fine-tuning your company cafeteria plan ensures you’re providing the best experience possible. The amount of thought you put into your plan will be noticed and enhance the positive outcome gained from establishing your cafeteria program.
Diverse and Customizable Menus
Your cafeteria menu should include allergy-friendly and dietary restriction-friendly options always. Everyone should have an opportunity to eat and relax during lunch in the same way their peers do. Also, be sure to have a rotating menu, as nobody wants to eat the same things every day. The variety can help bring more diverse nutrients into employees’ diets.
Asking for feedback on meals can be a good way to assess your menu as a whole too. If you feel like more food is being wasted, it’s a good idea to ask what can be improved and make changes to ensure your cafeteria plan is having a productive impact.
Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Practices
Locally sourced ingredients and food help reduce the amount of travel time food takes to get to the office, thus reducing your carbon footprint from travel emissions. It’s a great way to stimulate your community’s economy and create positive relationships with other local businesses. Using seasonal ingredients helps reduce resource usage on farms as well in addition to being more nutritious than out-of-season foods.
Using eco-friendly dining methods helps drive home that you care about your employees and the environment we live in, whether it’s your community or the earth itself. Implementing recycling programs and having compost available allows your staff to make a difference.
Technology and Convenience
Modernizing your cafeteria experience makes things easier for everyone. It goes without saying that mobile ordering systems and food delivery apps have become wildly popular. Implementing those systems into your cafeteria plan gives employees the ability to use something they’re already familiar with.
Self-service options are nice as well. You can have self-checkout for snacks or drinks or self-service ordering systems for meals. This can help with time management and save money on extra labor costs.
Comfortable and Functional Spaces
Flexible seating arrangements allow for extra room and comfort during dining. Allowing seating to be moved around means people can group together during lunch, or you could even convert your cafeteria to a meeting area depending on the size of your space. The versatility helps people connect more easily without having to shout across tables and utilize the space if needed hassle-free.
Creating lounge areas when possible enhances comfort and relaxation during lunch periods. Separate lounge areas can also help prevent difficulty finding a place to eat, so if you want to finish your lunch break by catching up on a book, you can move to the lounge area. Outdoor spaces work well for this too, fresh air is perfect for relaxation during a stressful day.
Steps to Build a Successful Company Cafeteria Plan
With all that we’ve talked about so far in mind, you might be curious about the steps to implement a company cafeteria plan. It’s not as hard as it sounds, you just have to set realistic goals and carefully plan things out accordingly as you would with any business decision.
Step 1 – Assess Employee Preferences
First, you’ll want to learn what your staff expects from a cafeteria plan. Conduct a survey to gather information on any dietary needs and preferences employees have for a potential plan. Ask what types of things they’d like to see in a cafeteria, if they’d prefer a stipend instead, or anything else that might help you learn more about what they want. This will help you get realistic goals together on what your staff wants. Be sure to include dining hours if applicable in your survey.
Step 2 – Budget Planning and Vendor Selection
You can start budgeting once you have an idea for your cafeteria program. You should account for equipment costs, labor and staffing costs, and the cost of additional supplies. Researching and evaluating potential vendors will also be important. You should look into a vendor’s scalability and experience working with a cafeteria plan of your size. This will factor into your budget because you’ll have to have realistic expectations for the cost of the type of vendor you’ll need.
Step 3 – Design the Menu and Services
Be sure to consider well-balanced nutritious meals with enough variety. Aside from keeping employees from growing bored with your cafeteria plan’s menus, it’s important to have enough variety to maintain proper nutrition in your diet. A fun way to mix up your menu is to incorporate seasonal menus and holiday meal items. Seasonal ingredients are naturally more nutritious and taste better, whereas themed menu items add novelty. Having an engaging, health-conscious menu will have employees utilizing the cafeteria services available to them, ensuring your staff reaps the benefits of a cafeteria and your budget doesn’t go to waste.
Step 4 – Focus on Sustainability and Waste Management
In the final stages of developing your cafeteria plan, consider how you’ll be handling waste and sustainability practices. Sustainability is, in part, the reduction of waste, so the two go hand-in-hand. You should have a plan ready for data analytics in regard to your food waste levels and consumption trends. If you notice certain menu items aren’t being eaten or you’re wasting a lot of food, you can work with your cafeteria plan and vendor to make changes.
Implementing compost methods and recycling practices are important here as well. Accounting for all of your waste reflects your values as a business, so showing you care about how you manage your waste will help enhance your positive image. Overall, sustainability is the new normal, and it’s crucial to implement sustainability practices into your office cafeteria plan.
Step 5 – Pilot Program and Feedback Loop
Congratulations, you’ve finally made it to the test phase! Think of it as a soft launch, you’ll do a stress test to see how all the parts of your cafeteria plan will move. This is essential to help the longevity of your cafeteria plan. You can identify areas for improvement, any gaps that may arise, and ask for employee feedback. In fact, you should regularly be asking for employee feedback to ensure your cafeteria plan is working as it’s supposed to.
Benefits of Implementing a Company Cafeteria Plan
We previously talked about some of the ways companies benefit from cafeteria plans. Let’s go over each individually in-depth.
Increased Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Providing tasty and nutritious food at work shows that you care for employees’ health and well-being. It’s commonplace for people within the workforce to skip meals or have fast food for lunch because it’s easy. When you provide a better alternative, you make a serious investment in your team. Cafeteria plans strive to increase employee morale and engagement, leading to happier employees who stay in their positions longer. This can affect your future staff and talent pool, as free food at work is an appealing employee perk.
Boosted Productivity and Collaboration
Third places are hard to come by these days. People in general don’t have places where they can socialize and collaborate. Your cafeteria plan can facilitate a space for staff members who don’t usually work in the same department to come together, communicate, and find new networking opportunities.
Productivity increases as well, the positive and relaxing atmosphere you create can help staff get the break time they need. You save an employee’s time when they don’t have to leave work to get food. With a cafeteria plan, you can conveniently grab your meal and relax.
Supports Wellness and Corporate Culture
Encouraging healthy eating and sustainability through your cafeteria menu reinforces your commitment to your employees. Actions will always speak louder than words. The nutrition, waste management, sustainability practices, and how you handle your menu all show that you care.
This type of long-term investment in your staff will get noticed as well. When employees speak about your company, your supportiveness and care will most likely be included. Your cafeteria plan can help build a positive, employee-centric brand image.
Common Challenges in Creating a Company Cafeteria Plan (and Solutions)
Ideally, you would create your office cafeteria plan and it would execute with no problems. As most of us know already, however, the ideal rarely happens. Don’t worry though, we’re going to equip you with the knowledge to prepare yourself for the most common problems you might encounter when starting your cafeteria program.
Budget Limitations
For businesses that want a cafeteria, a budget for a plan can be limiting. Building out an on-site cafeteria is no easy feat and does take a lot of work. Not having the options your staff is looking for if any options at all can feel like a big hurdle.
Solution: Start with a hybrid model before you begin scaling for an on-site cafeteria. Have meal allowances/stipends and delivery partnerships to gauge the success of your meal program before you make the financial commitment. You can also give your company time to have the ability to increase the cafeteria budget.
Dietary Restrictions and Preferences
Sometimes you come up with the perfect menu and find the perfect vendor only to find out a portion of staff can’t utilize the cafeteria plan at all due to allergens, dietary restrictions, or just different preferences. It can feel frustrating to work hard on a great project only for it to flop in practice.
Solution: Ensure beforehand that you have enough menu variety to accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences. Allergens should be labeled when applicable to avoid medical emergencies. You don’t need to hire a short-order cook, just make sure you’re paying attention to what people need from you to make your cafeteria plan a success.
Managing Food Waste
Food waste is a normal part of running any cafeteria or food establishment, but food waste equates to lost money. Companies often find themselves wasting quite a bit of food, making their cafeteria budgets shaky and sometimes unpredictable. In the worst-case scenario, this could mean closing your cafeteria program for good. It doesn’t look great either if you’re throwing out a lot of food.
Solution: Track food as it’s wasted and work with vendors to come up with pars to make a more appropriate amount of food. Restaurants do this often and keep track of their busy days so they know when to have more food prepped. Minimizing overproduction helps reduce food waste and creates a more sustainability-friendly cafeteria plan. Incorporating a composting system can enhance sustainability as well.
Questions to Ask Vendors Before Finalizing a Company Cafeteria Plan
When you’re looking for a vendor, you should treat it like an interview. You want to make sure the vendor is a good fit for your company with your budget, nutritional needs, and anything else important to making your personal cafeteria plan a success. We’re going to go over some important questions to ask a vendor before moving forward with them.
Food Quality and Menu Options
Food quality will make or break a menu and it’s important to know what your menu limitations are when looking for a vendor. You should ask them things like:
- How do you accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences?
- How often do you update menus, and do you offer seasonal items?
They should have concise answers for each of these and any wishy-washy responses should be taken as a red flag. Neither of these things is something you should compromise.
Technology and Payment Systems
Learning how vendors use technology and payment systems can help you get a feel for how they’ll integrate into your cafeteria plan. Some vendors might have pre-determined POS systems they want to use or specific apps, so making sure that fits in with your goals is important. Consider asking these questions to start:
- Do you offer mobile ordering, contactless payments, or meal-tracking apps?
- How do you handle large volumes during peak dining hours?
You’ll learn a lot about a vendor with these questions and it saves hassle later if something ends up not being a good fit.
Sustainability and Eco-Friendly Practices
Sustainability has been a key point in much of our discussion about office cafeteria plans. That’s because it matters, sustainability and eco-friendly practices are things people actively care about. It’s your duty to ensure you’re asking questions about how vendors handle these practices since they’ll be intrinsically tied to your business.
- Do you use locally sourced ingredients or eco-friendly packaging?
- What measures do you take to reduce food waste?
This is another set of questions where your vendor should have a definitive answer. As mentioned previously, whatever decisions your vendor makes will naturally be seen as a decision your organization is making as well.
Scalability and Growth
Scalability and growth for cafeteria plans are essential for small or medium-sized businesses that expect to continue growing. Sometimes companies choose a great vendor that ends up struggling to keep up with the business’s rapid expansions. If you know your business is growing, you should have a conversation with your potential vendors about said growth beforehand to make sure they can handle it.
- Can your services scale as the company grows?
- Do you provide catering for meetings and events?
The question about meetings and events can let you know if you’ll need a separate vendor in the future. If you’re interested in keeping the same vendor for convenience’s sake, this is worth noting.
Measuring the Success of Your Company Cafeteria Plan
From what vantage point would you be able to tell how successful your cafeteria plan is? There are several different ways to break down “success”, which can help diagnose specific potential problems down the line.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are used in nearly every business already. You can track success based on employee satisfaction surveys, participation levels and usage rates, and food waste metrics. Having specific metrics for each aspect of your cafeteria plan allows you to see which things are working and which aren’t. This is incredibly important to the health of your cafeteria plan to ensure its continued success.
Continuous Improvement Strategies
Office cafeteria plans aren’t a one-and-done thing. If you want your cafeteria plan to continue to benefit your employees, you have to keep pushing for improvements. When you receive that regular feedback from employees, follow up on it and put it into action. Update your menus with trending menu items or the changing preferences of your staff. Even incorporating fun theming or loyalty programs can keep your cafeteria plan fresh. Continuing to add and change your cafeteria plan will keep your success in motion.
Final Thoughts on Building a Company Cafeteria Plan
A well-structured cafeteria plan plays an essential role in productivity and employee satisfaction. Companies benefit long-term through recruitment and retention rates, and as a bonus, your workplace culture will improve overall. Implementing a successful cafeteria plan can have nothing but positive effects on nearly any business.
If you feel like you’re missing out on a good cafeteria plan, consider implementing one at your company. Services like Zerocater allow you to start a cafeteria plan with any budget or company size, allowing you to fully customize your experience. With Zerocater you can seamlessly cater any events with the same service as well. Whether you’re a new startup looking for hybrid cafeteria options or a large company ready to fit out your cafeteria space, companies like Zerocater can help make it easy.