Why Your Corporate Cafeteria Menu Matters
Corporate cafeteria menus have evolved a lot, emphasizing nutrition and quality more than offering fast food or other cheap options. Creating a positive dining experience for employees is essential for an effective cafeteria plan, and a lasting positive experience takes effort. Through nutritious, thoughtfully chosen menu options, you can create an important space for development in your company.
Overall, productivity and company culture will improve when a good cafeteria plan is implemented, and supporting employee wellness will increase engagement. Nutritional food and relaxation are essential to operating as a well-functioning person, let alone a star employee. Providing delicious, healthy food through your cafeteria menu ensures you’re giving employees the best possible experience, maximizing those benefits.
Your corporate cafeteria menu is the heart of your cafeteria plan. If it’s not good food, not inclusive, and lacks variety, you’ll end up wasting your and your employee’s time and money. We’ll show you how to create the perfect cafeteria menu and magnify the positive capabilities your cafeteria plan has to offer.
What Is a Corporate Cafeteria Menu?
Definition and Purpose
A corporate cafeteria menu is a structured menu created to meet the dietary preferences and needs of employees in a corporate setting. The purpose of this menu should be to provide convenience, variety, and nutrition to enhance overall employee satisfaction.
Benefits of a Thoughtfully Designed Corporate Cafeteria Menu
- Promotes Healthy Eating Habits: It can support pre-existing employee wellness programs with balanced, nutritional options. It can also introduce employees to new healthy foods in a way they haven’t experienced before.
- Encourages Employee Engagement: It can create a space for collaboration and informal networking by giving a reason for employees to gather in the same place.
- Boosts Productivity: It can reduce the time spent leaving the office for meals. It also makes it easier to avoid buying fast food or skipping meals.
- Enhances Company Culture: It can reflect the organization’s commitment to employee well-being. Committing your menu to nutrition shows you care about employee health.
Key Elements of a Corporate Cafeteria Menu
We can break down the key elements of a corporate cafeteria menu into five parts:
Menu Variety and Customization
Offer a variety of different cuisines that include international choices and regional favorites. Menu items should also have the ability to be customized for dietary restrictions. This ensures your menu is desirable, interesting, and able to be used by everyone. If you don’t have good variety and customization in your menu, it’s less likely to entice people to enjoy it.
Healthy and Nutritious Choices
A good menu should offer fresh vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains. These are packed with nutrition required to physically and mentally get through most complex workdays. You can also craft your menu to highlight certain types of healthy items. Low-sodium, high-protein, lower-calorie, vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free items can have specific symbols that make them easy to find.
Seasonal and Rotating Menus
Seasonal ingredients are higher in nutrition as they’re grown during their peak season. For freshness and variety’s sake, try to include seasonal ingredients often. Rotating your menu makes this easier, and rotating your menu in general prevents boredom with menu items. Employees are more likely to stay engaged when a portion of your cafeteria menu is regularly changed out.
Dietary and Allergy-Friendly Options
Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and nut-free options are just some of the examples of dietary and allergy-friendly options you should provide on your menu. Including options for people who have restrictive diets helps everyone enjoy your cafeteria menu. For safety’s sake, be sure to label foods that contain allergens clearly. This avoids accidental allergic reactions and potential hospital visits.
Grab-and-Go Items for Convenience
Sometimes, you just don’t have a lot of time to sit and eat. Providing easy-to-grab items like wraps, pre-packaged salads, and protein bowls ensures employees in a rush have something to eat. Having healthy snacks on hand, like granola, fruit cups, and yogurt, helps too. Your menu should be designed with everyone in mind for whatever everyday situations you can think of.
Steps to Create an Effective Corporate Cafeteria Menu
Now that you know what to put on your menu, let’s look at how to create and maintain it to your company’s specifications.
Step 1 – Assess Employee Preferences
The best way to know what people want is to ask. Get a survey together and ask questions about dietary preferences and restrictions. You should also pay attention to any popular dishes being requested. After your menu is released, continue with follow-up surveys to learn more about what menu items work and which don’t. The feedback you get can help you make necessary menu improvements to ensure it continues being effective and engaging.
Step 2 – Plan Balanced Meals
Menu items should work together to have a variety of nutrients. Be sure to have lots of lean proteins like chicken, fish, and tofu, and whole grains like brown rice and quinoa. For even more variety, superfoods like kale, avocado, and berries are perfect for additional nutrients. Balancing meals through nutritional variety maximizes their benefit.
Step 3 – Focus on Presentation and Portion Sizes
We eat with our eyes first, so having appealing food displays can get employees hungry and excited to eat. Having pictures of the food helps people visualize and decide what they’d like to eat. Portion sizes are a good option for health-conscious employees as well.
Step 4 – Incorporate Flexibility and Trends
Buffet-style menu options help a lot with flexibility. Taco bars, pasta buffets, and salad bars are all very popular corporate cafeteria options as they allow a lot of flexibility and versatility. Trendy food options also keep engagement high. Offering plant-based proteins, smoothie bars, and fusion cuisine can be very good for engagement as well. Giving people the option to “play” with their food means they get to eat how they want instead of feeling stuck to a designated menu.
Step 5 – Implement Feedback Loops
As we mentioned before, you should have consistent communication between yourself and your cafeteria goers. Collecting ongoing feedback with suggestion boxes or online forms can help you catch people as suggestions are still fresh on their minds. You should continue to update and rotate menus as needed based on the feedback you receive.
Popular Themes and Menu Ideas for Corporate Cafeterias
Weekly Themes
Dedicating days to having specific menus can give employees something to look forward to, especially on harder days like Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Here are some of the more popular options:
- Taco Tuesdays: Allows people to build their own tacos and burritos in a taco bar style. The buffet style is flexible with a ton of options and the food style can be both healthy and delicious.
- Wellness Wednesdays: These days have more of a focus on superfoods and lower-calorie meals. This can be perfectly paired with wellness education.
- International Fridays: You can have rotating cuisines like Italian, Thai, and Mediterranean. Rotating the menu makes it more fun and engaging.
Seasonal and Holiday Menus
Seasonal and holiday menus can be incredibly engaging and fun experiences. This is also a great opportunity to work in nutritional ingredients. For example, in the fall, your menu could include pumpkin soup, hearty beef stew, and apple-related desserts. Around holidays, you can have special menu items as well. Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas cranberry-themed items, and cute pink treats around Valentine’s Day.
Specialty Stations and Bars
The flexibility of buffets and do-it-yourself bars is very popular because it gives people the power to create their perfect snack or meal.
- Salad Bars: You can include fresh greens, classic veggie toppings, lean proteins, and a variety of dressings for customizable options. Having unconventional salad toppings can be fun, too, like including fruits, seeds, veggie straws, or whatever else your employees might enjoy.
- Smoothie Stations: Smoothie stations should include fresh fruits and greens, various protein powders and vitamin add-ins, and juices, milk, or alternative milk bases. Smoothies are a great, hypercustomizable grab-and-go option.
- Grill Stations: Staff a grill for some super fresh made-to-order burgers, chicken, and grilled vegetables. The smell is enticing and the visuals of having fresh proteins made in front of you is sure to help work up an appetite.
Incorporating Sustainability in Your Corporate Cafeteria Menu
Sustainability is essential for modern businesses, and it includes the well-being of their employees in their company culture. Incorporating sustainability into your menu can be done in a few different ways:
Sourcing Local Ingredients
Working with local farmers to provide locally sourced ingredients can help reduce the amount of time your ingredients need to travel and help your local community’s economy. Fresh, local produce and meat are typically more nutrient-dense than other means of getting ingredients as well. It ends up being a win all around.
Eco-Friendly Packaging and Utensils
Investing in reusable silverware and plates is a great way to reduce waste from packaging and plastic utensils. Dine-in employees can deposit their used plates and silverware into bus bins so they can be washed and reused later. For employees who need to take their food to go, you can provide biodegradable food containers and utensils as well to further reduce your waste.
Reducing Food Waste
Food waste is one of the largest types of waste coming from establishments serving food. To combat this, you should keep track of your inventory and food consumption trends to ensure the proper amount of food is made. Food waste can be stopped at the source before it happens this way. You can also offer smaller portions with the option for employees to come back for additional helpings of food to reduce waste from uneaten portions.
Technology Solutions for Managing a Corporate Cafeteria Menu
Modernizing your cafeteria is another great way to show your employees you care about their cafeteria experience.
Digital Menu Boards
Digital menu boards make it easy to change your menu as needed. Instead of having a physical board, you can change what’s on the menu in real time on your digital screens for menu swap outs or sold out items. You can also have digital menus that display nutritional information for menu items, daily specials, or can change automatically for things like breakfast/lunch changeovers.
Mobile Ordering Systems
Mobile ordering allows employees to pre-order their meals via an app. This can help prevent longer lines and wait times for food. You can even integrate ordering analytics to see what people are ordering, which can be used as a means of tracking food waste. Many mobile ordering systems integrate easily with modern POS systems, making it easy to track payments all in one place.
Feedback and Data Analytics
Digital surveys and polls can help you gather feedback on your menu. You can track feedback and adjust your menu to employee preferences. Modernized POS systems are perfect for tracking sales to correlate with feedback as well. You can see what people are buying and what’s going to waste.
Tips for Promoting Your Corporate Cafeteria Menu
Your cafeteria is like a mini-business within your business. For people to use it and for it to be effective, you should market it as such.
Internal Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a great way to introduce new menu changes and advertise upcoming events. You can use company communication platforms as well, especially for daily specials as some people don’t always check their email every day. Be sure to include pictures of the food to entice people to come and eat in the cafeteria.
Special Events and Tastings
To further the positive experiences associated with your cafeteria, you can have special events that allow people to get to see more behind the scenes. “Meet the Chef” events allow people to ask questions about the food and get to know who makes their food and crafts their menus. This inside look into how your cafeteria operates gives people the opportunity to build stronger connections to what they eat. You can offer tasting events as well, where staff has the option to get involved in the menu designing process.
Incentive Programs
To encourage people to come back, many cafeterias offer things like punch cards and loyalty programs with discounts. This rewards people for continuously visiting and using your cafeteria. If you integrate your wellness program into your cafeteria, you can offer rewards for health goals as well. For example, you can offer various prizes for healthy eating contests. The prizes can be whatever you want, like meal vouchers or gift cards.
Measuring the Success of Your Corporate Cafeteria Menu
So how do you determine the success of your cafeteria menu, and how do you continue it?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Quantifying your menu with KPIs is the easiest way to determine specific successes and failures in your menu. Employee participation and satisfaction surveys can tell you how people feel about your cafeteria overall, and you can follow up with questions relating to what would make people come in more often or what you can do better.
Feedback on menu variety, quality, and portion sizes can tell you if the back end of your menu is moving as it should. If there are freshness issues, you can find a new vendor for your ingredients or ensure cafeteria staff is properly trained on food safety.
Cost efficiency reports and food waste metrics are also important to determine how much food is being eaten vs. how much food is being made. If your cost efficiency isn’t good or your food waste is high, try to mitigate that by making less food or removing unpopular menu items.
Continuous Improvement Strategies
As we’ve mentioned throughout this article, there’s a heavy emphasis here on consistently improving your menu. Paying attention to food trends, seasonal availability, and regularly implementing new types of cuisine are all important for keeping employees excited about your cafeteria. As with everything, balance is key, so paying attention to popular menu items can help you choose which items stay permanently and which items get rotated out.
Final Thoughts on Crafting a Corporate Cafeteria Menu
Offering a varied, nutritious, and engaging menu at your corporate cafeteria creates productive and healthy employees. When you neglect your cafeteria, you end up neglecting a key force in your arsenal to elevate staff satisfaction and retention rates.
If you want to perfect your cafeteria menu and corporate cafeteria plan, companies like Zerocater exist solely to help you maximize your cafeteria benefits. Zerocater is a service that allows you to hire corporate caterers and design your perfect cafeteria on any budget. You can create a tailor-made menu with exactly what your employees want with the help of expert staff. If you’re ready to have the perfect menu, contact us today, and we’ll give you personalized information on your ideal cafeteria or food program.
