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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It's because the article says they spent $108 million on food per year.

That works out to $38 per person per day. That's a LOT. It should be maybe 1/10 that considering that not everyone will eat the food every day.

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Google supposedly spends between $20 and $30 a day.*

Those numbers are from several years ago, so it's plausible that Yahoo needs to pay more per employee now.

There are certainly ways to do cheaper foodservice, but probably not many ways to do Google/SV-quality free employee food for much less.

* http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-free-food-budget-5000-... * http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/googles-ginormous-food...

>not many ways to do Google/SV-quality free employee food for much less

may be they brought me into a wrong cafeteria :) - when i went for an interview at Google, the food was so-so, and in no way beating a $10 lunch at a typical commercial place (and even less so a $20 lunch at a restaurant). A colleague of mine went there recently for some business meeting - the same impression about the food.

Sure, but that doesn't tell you anything about the cost to Google of providing that food, including at unpopular times etc.

Google serves 3 meals a day. Most just eat lunch, a good bit eat breakfast, and dinner is the least attended. That said, there are still lines for every meal.

Those numbers seem high given that I personally spend $20 a day on food for all meals (whereas corporate meals are probably covering 1.5 meals per day) and don't get much by way of economies of scale (despite my most valiant Costco efforts).

Are you paying people to cook your food and clean your dishes for you?

Not the person you are asking, but I can answer yes to that at the same price point, and we are talking about cheap fast food either. $25+ for a meal is not cheap.

That's breakfast, lunch, and probably 5% dinner (a small minority of HQ), including cleanup costs (washing dishes, etc). You have to have some over-capacity as its a cafeteria - you can't run out of food at any time, so throw in an extra 10% - 20% food.

Then add in snacks and drinks, which come out to a few dollars a day per employee, including stocking costs, running the coffee bars, etc. That's a few drinks from the fridge, a coffee or two, a few bags of snacks a day.

And I don't know anyone working at any SV tech headquarters who don't eat the food every day. Personally I've maybe eaten not at work for breakfast and lunch...10 work days in the past year?

While the HQ gets economies of scale, smaller offices are more expensive. Y! SF catered for a long time before finally also switching over to Bon Appetit. Y! NYC provided a daily seamless stipend before they finally built out the in-house dining area.

Add in non-full time contractors as well, who generally get the eat at the cafeteria as well.

Bon Appetit is a standard, albeit higher end, food services company. They serve colleges as diverse as Cornell, Oberlin, the College of Idaho, Lewis and Clark, etc. It's the same company used by Google, Oracle, and eBay. It's hard to describe them as over-priced and overly-luxurious.

We have no idea if the food estimate is correct. The article mentions that many people in Yahoo interviewed by the reporter think the investor's numbers are widely off.

My guess the $108m includes other things than just food.

Agree. But I am sure it wasn't "lunch lady land" food but instead prepared with the utmost of care by a private chef who had serious chops to create "healthy" meals. This probably wasn't (wild guess?) local school district fare.

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