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Years ago when I was a professor, I brought a cohort of executive strategic design MBA students to Florence, Italy, to study the Renaissance as a living laboratory for business innovation. We visited palazzos, workshops, and guild halls. But the moment that really lit up everyone was in a small art studio, before a single paintbrush was lifted. The studio director greeted us daily at the door with the smell and taste of freshly baked cake or cookies. That was it. No slides, no agenda, no icebreaker. Just warm sweets.
What happened next still fascinates me. A room full of accomplished, analytically rigorous MBA students became completely present and joyful: curious, open, and alive to what the afternoon might hold. The studio director had not addressed a rational need. She had addressed an emotional one. Food was the proxy and belonging was the point.
I’ve been thinking about that Florence moment a lot lately, because the data is finally catching up to what that studio director understood instinctively.
EzCater’s 2026 Workplace Catering Insights report, released at the Catering Growth Forum, reveals that 79% of hybrid employees say employer-provided meals would make them more likely to stay under an onsite mandate. Daily and weekly meal programs have grown 26% year-over-year, with 81% of those meals free to employees. And 91% of workplace orderers plan to spend the same or more on food programs in 2026, up from 82% just two years ago—with one in five planning to increase spending by more than 25%.
I spoke with Cindy Klein Roche, Chief Marketing Officer at ezCater, about what these numbers actually reveal, and the answer goes deeper than catering budgets.
“Food is not a mandate,” Klein Roche told me. “The leaders who are getting this right use food as motivation, not compliance. There’s a real difference between a carrot and a stick.” Care.com’s results underscore this: by introducing intentional “learning lunches,” they achieved a 3x increase in on-site attendance without a single mandate—while saving over 100 hours a month in administrative friction. Coralogix saw the same 3x attendance lift on days they provide food. That’s not a catering win. That’s a culture win.
The structural insight is equally compelling. NorthPoint Development moved away from a fixed, high-overhead cafeteria model to a flexible, restaurant-based program and simultaneously cut food costs by 35% while raising employee engagement scores. BioAgilytix went further: after making their weekly meal program a reward for the 60 employees with the strongest lab results each month, they saw a 10% increase in team productivity. The false trade-off between investment and engagement dissolves when organizations stop treating food as a facility line item and start treating it as cultural infrastructure.
Klein Roche put it plainly: “You measure what matters. Organizations that are formalizing meal programs are doing so because they’ve decided this matters—and they’re right.” In ezCater’s research, free lunch ranks among the top three workplace perks that excite employees, placing above co-funded 401(k) contributions for many respondents. When I pointed out that the ritual of eating together is as old as human civilization itself, she didn’t miss a beat: “Food reinforces the need to take a pause in the day. It signals that a break matters and that daily appreciation of each other has its place among all the moments that matter at work.”
This is what I think of as the “Move. Think. Rest.” principle applied to organizational design: the pause is not lost time. It is the condition integrated into the day to help produce our best work. EzCater’s 2025 Lunch Report makes the performance case explicit: nearly 9 in 10 employees say hunger negatively affects their job performance, causing them to take longer to complete tasks (43%), make more mistakes (39%), and produce lower-quality work (31%). Feeding people is not a perk. It is a productivity intervention.
The studio director in Florence knew something our productivity culture keeps relearning: you cannot extract creativity and commitment from people you haven’t first made to feel welcome. She didn’t serve freshly baked treats because she had a retention strategy. She served it because she understood what it meant to invite someone into meaningful work.
The leaders getting this right today understand the same thing. The question isn’t whether you can afford a meal program. It’s whether you can afford to keep treating belonging as optional.
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[Photo: Wiley]
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