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If it’s your responsibility to feed your team, a lot is weighing on you when it comes to your office lunch ideas.
Coming up with lunch catering ideas for an office event isn’t easy, but it’s doable. After all, it’s for just the one event. What’s more challenging is deciding on everyday office lunch ideas to keep your employees satisfied day in and day out. From figuring out how to maintain variety and avoid menu fatigue to deciding on dishes that appeal to everyone, there are a lot of factors that come into play.
In this post, we take some of that mental load off your plate and share some of the best workplace lunch ideas that actually work. We also share a few tips on how to make your office lunch programs a success. Let’s take a look.
Across different organizations, lunch is a common factor that influences workplace culture and employee productivity. Fooda’s latest “What’s Happening in the Workplace Now?” survey found that it’s a key driver of office attendance. When a company provides lunch, 80% of employees feel more enthusiastic about work.
This shows just how impactful lunch can be in boosting employee morale and attendance. Having access to fulfilling lunch options can even ensure that on-site days feel more “worth it.”
Moreover, office lunch programs create an opportunity for employees to interact with one another over a meal. This fosters deep connection between colleagues, which plays a crucial role in building workplace culture. It could even drive collaboration and innovation as these interactions fuel idea exchange and problem-solving.
Productivity is another key benefit of offering lunch at the workplace. Since employees don’t have to leave the office to get lunch, it gives them more time to sit down and enjoy their meal. This significantly boosts productivity, with companies like BenchPrep estimating a daily time savings of at least 30 minutes.
With all this considered, companies need to step up their game and develop office lunch programs that boost employee satisfaction. This means keeping employee needs and expectations top of mind as you come up with workplace lunch ideas.
The Fooda survey found that employees want food that doesn’t taste terrible. They demand much more. They also seek variety, which makes sense because it’s easy to get bored with the same old choices day after day. Sure, gourmet sandwiches sound great, but when you’re having them for the fifth time that week, they’ll eventually end up losing their appeal. In other words, variety and quality are expectations more than they are perks.
So static menus and institutional food are no longer going to cut it. If you want an office lunch program that your employees truly love, you need to keep coming up with fresh and exciting employee lunch ideas to meet these expectations.
Fooda offers workplace dining solutions to take your lunch menu planning to the next level. With a rotating lineup of local restaurants, it’s easy to diversify your employee lunch menu and bring authentic flavors right into the workplace. Let’s explore a few workplace lunch ideas inspired by Fooda-operated cafeterias.
Providing healthy office lunches is one of the best ways that employers can encourage employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This not only improves employee morale but eventually leads to better productivity and fewer sick days, which ultimately benefit the organization.
Some studies show that employees with an unhealthy diet are 66% more likely to see a drop in productivity compared to those who eat healthy. Meanwhile, there’s a 25% boost in job performance for employees who balance a healthy diet with regular exercise. So it only makes sense for employers to provide healthy office lunches and even offer subsidized meals to encourage participation.
Here are some healthy office lunch ideas you can consider:
· Salad bars with a variety of options
· Grilled chicken cool wrap
· Veggie donburi bowl
· Quinoa and feta stuffed peppers, squash succotash, wild rice pilaf
· Grilled octopus with pineapple and cilantro
· Southwest veggie wrap
· Cedar plank salmon with fig balsamic reduction
When it comes to menu fatigue, the easiest way to solve it is by rotating between different cuisines. From savory and umami Asian flavors to bold and spicy Latin American food, lunch is never boring when employees get to go on a culinary adventure across the world.
Check out some of these exciting dishes to bring global flavors into your office lunch.
· Tofu pad see ew
· Au poivre sandwich (roast beef, peppercorn fromage blanc, onion, cucumber, lettuce, tomato, Dijon)
· Build-your-own bowls with purple rice, noodles, kimchi, tofu, or chicken
· Labneh wrap (falafel, feta, olives, cucumber, pepperoncini, tomato, labneh, toum)
· Chorizo, black bean, and egg empanada
· Salmon skin roll (salmon, crispy salmon skin, eel sauce)
· Chicken makhani
· Peruvian lomo saltado, arroz chaufa, saltado de mariscos
Who doesn’t like to indulge in some comfort meal every once in a while? Whether you’ve had a tough day or you want to celebrate a win (like closing a new deal), comfort food brings much-needed warmth and familiarity for a satisfying lunch. Here are a few comfort food options you can include in your office lunch program:
· Traditional wings
· Malbec beef empanada with chimichurri sauce
· Chicken and chive dumplings
· Corned beef brisket
· Macaroni and cheese
· Beef birria tacos
· Chicken pot pie
Between back-to-back meetings and looming deadlines, sometimes, employees just don’t have the time to sit down for a meal or wait for one to be prepared. That’s why grab-and-go lunch options are an excellent way to offer satisfying meals while balancing it with convenience and speed. Think of sandwiches, wraps, and ready-to-eat meal bowls that don’t need too much prep time.
Check out some of these grab-and-go employee lunch ideas for inspiration:
· Pesto wrap (ham, dill Havarti, lettuce, tomato, onion, pesto mayo)
· Grilled chicken cool wrap
· Spicy southwest chicken salad
· Truffle hog sandwich (ham, cheddar, cucumber, tomato, lettuce, truffle herb mayo)
· Poke bowls with tuna, salmon, tofu, and bamboo rice
Whether it’s a holiday celebration or a special event, centering your workplace lunch ideas around a certain theme keeps things fresh and exciting. You could bring in Thanksgiving classics around the holidays or pick up interactive DIY themes to drive participation.
Here are a few themed office lunch ideas and menu options you can try:
· Thanksgiving sandwich (smoked turkey breast, brie, onion, cranberry sauce)
· Thanksgiving pizza
· Build-your-own bar (for tacos, burritos, sandwiches, grain bowls, etc.)
· 4th-of-July-style barbeque
· Sushi bar
· Cuisine adventure (featuring a different cuisine each day)
The office lunch ideas we shared above can give you inspiration when crafting a lunch menu for your employees. However, just having a few ideas can only get you so far. Instead, you need to have foundational knowledge on how to design an office lunch menu that your employees will actually like.
Here are a few tips and best practices to ensure a more successful office lunch program.
As cliché as it may sound, variety really is the spice of life. And this holds true especially when it comes to office lunch. When employees have the freedom to choose from multiple options, it’s easier to cater to their specific dietary needs and preferences. It also gives them the flexibility to choose a meal that fits their budget and schedule. So you can consistently maintain employee satisfaction throughout your organization.
With workplace dining solutions like Orange by Fooda, you can bring in a rotating lineup of the best local restaurants right to your workplace. This allows you to serve up fresh and diverse lunch menus with authentic flavors to keep employees satisfied.
Fooda also helps you maintain a more flexible service mix with micro markets and resident cafes to offer even greater variety. That way, employees will always have an option that fits their unique needs – whether they just need to grab a quick snack or feel like relaxing over a freshly cooked meal.
Menu fatigue is one of the biggest challenges when implementing a workplace food program that’s diverse and fulfilling. And the best way to solve it is by rotating cuisines. This involves featuring a different cuisine every day, so employees get the chance to discover new dishes and embrace their love for food. For example, you could have Mexican on Monday, Mediterranean on Tuesday, Japanese on Wednesday, and so on.
Cuisine rotation could be especially successful, considering that Americans are becoming more adventurous when it comes to food. A OnePoll survey found that 53% of Americans consider themselves to be adventurous eaters, with many of them showing an openness to trying global cuisines.
Orange by Fooda makes it easy to rotate cuisines with pop-up restaurants featuring rotating guests. You can bring in a new restaurant every day and alternate between different cuisines to keep things fresh and interesting.
Offering healthy office lunch options helps you encourage healthy eating and prioritize employee well-being. It allows employees to effectively meet their wellness goals without sacrificing time and convenience.
At the same time, only having access to healthy meals can get boring after a while. Employees may love the option to grab salads and nutrient-packed grain bowls, but relying on these same meals over and over again is bound to get tedious. So bring in some excitement by throwing in more variety.
This could involve alternating between different restaurants that offer a vast selection of healthy dishes. For example, a Hawaiian fusion restaurant with a wide range of protein options to build your own poke bowl could replace a restaurant offering a variety of plant-forward meal bowls and salads.
It could also involve balancing healthy options with more indulgent food choices. For instance, you could have a resident salad bar and bring in guest restaurants that specialize in hearty comfort meals. That way, employees always have a healthy office lunch option with the freedom to choose something different on days they feel like indulging.
Relying on guesswork when coming up with office lunch ideas may work to an extent. You’ll definitely have a few hits, but there’s a good chance you’ll also have a few misses. And on days when they don’t like the menu, you’ll likely end up with disappointed employees and possibly even food waste.
That’s why you need to make data-backed decisions to come up with office lunch menus that your employees actually like. Make the most of ordering data to identify patterns and preferences. So you can understand what your employees like and craft your lunch menus accordingly.
With Fooda, you can leverage ordering data for adaptive restaurant scheduling. This allows you to bring in the right restaurants at the right time, helping you maintain a fresh and exciting menu lineup minus all the guesswork.
For instance, you might notice that a certain restaurant always sees high order volumes, it indicates that employees love the food. So bringing them back every week could help you keep employees satisfied. Or if grab-and-go options tend to do really well on busy Mondays, you could focus your menu planning on those options for that specific day of the week.
Want to develop workplace lunch menus that your employees love?
Explore Fooda’s workplace dining solutions to scale your office lunch program.
