We discuss the current interest among tech companies such as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter in providing healthy low-cost or even free food as a way of building company culture and promoting health and innovation among their employees.
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Isaac Pino: Just before our discussion, you were sharing some of your stories around the culture of Silicon Valley and some of the companies that you work with currently. At the beginning, perhaps companies were not necessarily buying into the idea of, “We need to feed our employees sustainable, healthy food and make it available for lunch.”
What were some companies that started to tip that balance, how did that progress, and where are we today, at least around Silicon Valley? I thought you had some interesting things to share.
Fedele Bauccio: When we first started out in Silicon Valley, companies wanted…
The first interesting story was at Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL). Larry Ellison wanted us to create in his first building a paninoteca, which is like a little Italian sandwich shop that you would find in Milan.
I said, “I can do that; I’m Italian,” so we created this little paninoteca, but realizing as he was starting to grow the company — if you’ve ever been out at Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL), there’s a lake and then there’s a number of buildings — we created different concepts. We have a Japanese noodle bar, we have a Mediterranean marketplace, we have an Indian curry house.
We have all these different concepts in each building, so employees never have to leave. They wanted to be more productive, and so forth.
From that showcase, everybody wanted to have something unique and different, so we customize these locations. We have no menu cycles or recipe boxes or anything. Everything is like a small little cafe or restaurant.
At that time, the idea of having food service for corporations was to retain talent. It also was to make sure that they were productive — they never left campus to go have three martinis at lunch — that was the idea.
There was also some idea of breaking bread together, as you do a couple of times a week here. It creates a culture. We eat together, and we create culture.
Nowadays, if I took you to Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) or Twitter, or some of the other locations that we serve, it’s free food. They spend a lot of money on free food. The objective is to create healthy, really good food.
