Healthy office lunch delivery: how to cater to every palate
A comprehensive guide to getting healthy office catering for every member of your workforce. From London-based specialist food contract catering company Fooditude.
IIf you’re like almost every business in London, one thing is guaranteed: your team is not homogeneous. Diversity is everywhere. People work in the capital from different backgrounds, different beliefs, and different languages. The same is true when it comes to their eating habits.
Catering for a large team of employees can quickly become complex and overwhelming. With different palates, dietary preferences and allergies to manage, it can soon feel like an impossible job.
Using our experience of delivering fresh and healthy meals to employees of big tech companies and London businesses, this post will show you why securing a customised office lunch delivery is so important – and how you can take every possible step to keep your employees happy, healthy and engaged with nutritious and delicious food.
Understanding your team’s palates and preferences
The first step in finding a suitable office lunch delivery is to try to audit your team’s palates and preferences. This doesn’t have to be a particularly difficult task. A simple survey or in-work consultation should give you all the information you need. Typical dietary considerations might include:
- Vegetarianism
- Veganism
- Allergies
- Halal
- Gluten-free
- Kosher
- Lactose intolerance
- Dairy-free
- Keto
If you’re feeling unsure, our friendly team takes customer-centricity to the next level. We’re happy to help you understand your team’s needs.
Why many providers find catering menu customisation and flexibility so difficult
Providing a single office lunch delivery that meets the requirements of a diverse team is beyond the reach of many food providers. In the most common issues we hear about, some caterers can:
- Find it difficult to manage employees’ dietary needs and preferences. Resulting in limited menu options, potential complaints, and general employee dissatisfaction.
- Lacks the ability to cater for allergens, making it difficult for every member of the team to eat with confidence.
- Struggle to build any flexibility into their provision, meaning employees are subjected to the same menus week after week.
- Provide deliveries that are inconsistent in their quality. When employees are never sure if the food they will receive is cooked well, warm, or made from high-quality ingredients, complaints are never far away.
Aggregators that collect food from different restaurants struggle to provide good, accurate food labelling. Leaving workplace managers stressed and guessing what the food is – and potentially, risking dangerous allergic reactions. This is just one of many reasons why ‘order in’ services like Deliveroo are not the best option for office lunch deliveries.
Other challenges with ‘order in’ services include managing the complexity of orders. A team leader would have to suit everyone’s preferences and dietary needs. Find a way to effectively list allergens and preferences on one app order. Then gather consensus from the whole team about which restaurant to order from. Inevitably it leads to disappointment or a feeling of exclusion for at least one team member. Cost is also a potential issue with these services.
But the truth is simple. Being able to provide office catering with dietary options, from a preference and an allergen perspective, is critical. It provides office lunch catering that doesn’t compromise quality over mass cooking. This is Fooditude’s secret to success.
5 ways Fooditude manages office lunch delivery better than well-known aggregators
The Fooditude team prides itself on taking healthy office lunch deliveries to the next level. Our service has been thought through and designed to make your life easier. Where the workplace manager is tasked with keeping employees happy, healthy, and engaged. Here are five areas on which we never compromise:
1. Inclusivity and innovation
We ensure our food caters to every dietary requirement and preference. We also make sure your employees from around the world get a welcome taste of home. As a matter of course, we routinely cater to major international and religious events, such as the 4th of July, Lunar New Year, and Eid.
We also invest time, effort and money into keeping our menus exciting and satisfying for your entire team. Different food programmes, seasonal menus, and weekly menus are all included as part of our service.
2. Budgets and variety
Providing inclusive, innovative and healthy office lunch deliveries is one thing. Doing it in a cost-effective way is completely different. Fears over budget restrictions is an issue for workplace managers looking to source the best office catering in London.
Our advice is always that one day of complimentary, high quality food does more for your employee engagement levels than five days of subsidised mediocre food. We also know from experience that Mondays and Fridays are excellent days to secure an office lunch delivery. It means either a great start to the week that lifts everyone for the challenges ahead or a celebration of a week of achievements that brings everyone together and builds the mood ahead of the weekend.
Our team is always happy and able to move budgets around to accommodate any changes you need. From cutting down snacks in order to invest more into meals (or vice versa) through to mixing hot-meal days with sandwich-and-salad days, we always work to keep your service costs in check.
3. Nutritional considerations
Health and wellness in the workplace has never been more important – and employee expectations are changing at a pace. London employers who neglect their team’s health and wellness are finding it harder to recruit and retain the very best talent.
At Fooditude, our kitchen always prioritises healthy and wholesome food. Whatever menu you choose from, we only ever use the freshest, highest-quality ingredients. Providing balanced and nutritious options for office lunches is a daily commitment on which we deliver – without fail.
4. Dietary requirements
Whether it’s the safe handling of common nut or dairy allergens, or the provision of kosher or halal ingredients, we put your team’s preferences, allergies, and requirements at the centre of our menus.
As a basic starting point, 80% of our menu is vegetarian, 60% is vegan, our soups are vegan, and our sides and salads are always at least vegetarian, and often vegan. Every day, two mains, two sides, and two salads are always gluten-free. Those steps give us the basic foundations on which we can then build further requirements as necessary.
Our kitchen is also run with precision. We provide safe food storage and preparation areas, taking care to separate any potential allergens at every step of the process.
Our new Ten Kites online menu system includes a detailed breakdown of our menus’ nutritional information; each buffet dish is labelled with allergens in bold; and all serving dishes include a QR code that your employees can scan for full nutritional information.
5. Seamless delivery experience
With Fooditude, you can eliminate worries about food arriving cold or losing taste before it is even served. Our seamless and efficient delivery process has been honed to give you the best possible results – with guaranteed on-time deliveries and with the clearly labelled containers you won’t get from other ‘order in’ smartphone services.
As standard, you can expect all our meals to arrive at the correct temperature (so you’ll never be looking for the microwave again). Trained Fooditude team members receive the delivery, then decant and display the food with everything served at a safe temperature and labelled correctly.
Our 20,000sq. ft state-of-the-art kitchen is affectionately known as ‘The Mothership’. It’s where all the magic happens and at every step from there through to the food being served to your team, you’ll always experience an exceptionally high level of customer service.
Remove the hassle from your office lunch delivery
If you’re a workplace manager in Central London, your day is already busy. Challenges are everywhere. Problems constantly need to be solved. But by working with Fooditude, you can remove one of the greatest daily difficulties from your to-do list.
You’ll no longer have to worry about keeping track of individual employees’ dietary requirements. You won’t have to concern yourself with whether your food is healthy, labelled correctly, or even warm. And you’ll be confident that your team feels appreciated, included, and valued through the provision of healthy and nutritious food at every opportunity.
Find out more about Fooditude’s office catering today.
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