What Employees Lose When There Is No Dining Program

By Pete Slabich, Regional Vice President, Aramark Workplace Hospitality

Most workplace leaders look at a dining program and ask about operating cost. Nobody asks what it costs to not have one.

I started my culinary career in the kitchen as a chef and moved into corporate dining early on. From there I worked my way up the organizational ladder, from Account Manager to District Manager to VP and now to RVP, leading Workplace Hospitality across the West region. And the question I have heard at times is this: is on site dining worth what it costs?

The math most leaders run is incomplete. It covers food, labor, operations, and skips what employees lose when there's no program in place. Which is the time spent deciding where to eat, traveling there, and getting refocused once they're back at their desk. Collaboration is part of what is missing as well. When people sit down and eat together at the office, conversations turn into brainstorming ideas and relationships form, something that doesn't happen the same way when everyone's off site on their own. This opportunity for idea sharing and collaboration can be a real win for organizations.

Here's how that hidden cost adds up and why it changes dining from a perk to something closer to infrastructure.

The Hidden Cost of a Missing Workplace Dining Program

When a building has no convenient on-site dining, employees do something I see often. They coordinate, debate, and wait at a counter somewhere off site. They come back, settle in, and refocus. And this sequence repeats every day for every employee who has no dining option present.

Even ten minutes a day, multiplied across 250 working days and 2,000 employees, becomes a significant productivity number. Now this is just a directional estimate, but what I have is years of watching how people move through buildings that have a dining program and buildings that do not. I've seen that difference play out.

That difference is exactly why my team remains proactive. When we sit down for a monthly or quarterly business review to discuss the programs in place, we're bringing proposals, and that includes discussing what a dining program is worth to team productivity, not just what it costs to operate. We also work in step with our sibling companies across Workplace Experience Group, so a client gets the mix that fits their space best. Whether that is coffee, vending, a 24/7 market, or a cafe that evolves with how people use the space.

The programs that work are the ones that flex. If a client is going through layoffs or budget pressure, we lean into morale, small touches, budget specials, engaging menu concepts without adding cost. When there's flexibility with budget, we look at how we can drive the program in different ways to enhance the guest experience, whether that's an ice cream bar on a hot day or a hot chocolate station around the holidays.

The category has also shifted toward self-checkout and ordering ahead. In a lot of cafes, the cashier was the relationship and the person who knew the regulars by name. Self-checkout saves labor and handles peak volume fine, but it changes what walking into the cafe feels like. That's why the manager's presence on the floor and the personality our frontline team brings to the stations matters more now, not less. It's how we keep efficiency without losing what the cashier relationship provides to the hospitality experience.

Returning Time Back to the Workday

It is easier to evaluate a cost than to evaluate an absence. But the time employees spend planning, traveling, and refocusing is real, and the compounding effect across a building is real too.

A few principles to bring into your next planning conversation:

• Measure the cost of not having a program, not only the cost of running one
• Expect your hospitality partner to bring ideas forward, not wait to be asked
• Treat dining as part of a connected workplace experience, not a standalone amenity
• Design programs that adapt to the client’s evolving needs and space

A well-run dining program doesn't just feed your team, it gives them time back, and that time back is where the productivity and efficiency gains live.

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Pete Slabich, Regional Vice President, Aramark Workplace Hospitality, leads the West region, an area spanning California to Michigan and covering more than 150 accounts, and is committed to delivering measurable service and results across every one of them.