By 11:45 a.m., when the steel door to Facebook’s employee cafeteria rolls open for lunch, there is almost always a line of people waiting for food.
On one day, the menu may feature Thai-spiced cilantro chicken or salmon with red curry sauce. On another, there may be roasted quail, a variety of chocolate-infused treats or the signature dishes of some of the top chefs of New York.
But Facebook’s motherly coddling of its employees actually taps into a long tradition in Silicon Valley, dating to the 1950s. That is when Hewlett-Packard began giving gifts to employees who married or had babies, treating its workers to free snacks and coffee during daily breaks and hosting a grand annual picnic at Little Basin, a vast redwood-covered tract the company bought in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The philosophy, part of a broader cultivation of employee loyalty and respect called the H.P. Way, inspired legions of technology companies, like I.B.M. and Apple, t0 believe that happier employees were more productive. Such now-common perks as casual Fridays and employee stock options eventually emerged from this movement.
Over time, as certain perks became common, companies looked for ways to separate themselves from the crowd, said Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., set a new standard in 1999, when it hired its own chef and opened a cafe that provided three high-quality meals a day to its workers. Within a few years, Google’s work force had ballooned, and its cooks were serving 18,000 meals a day in 18 cafes.
Now Facebook, which competes fiercely with Google for talent and has many former Google employees in its ranks, may have become the new standard-bearer for corporate-sponsored dining.
In addition to preparing sophisticated meals, Mr. Desimone has turned food into part of Facebook’s cultural life. He brings in celebrity chefs and prepares menus that create a buzz, like one based on “The Simpsons” television series, featuring deep-fried pork chops that Homer Simpson would have loved. For the employee who just happens to eat the 400,000th or 500,000th meal, Mr. Desimone will prepare a seven-course gourmet meal complete with wine, white tablecloths and an amuse-bouche.
And for the serious food lovers in its work force, Facebook recently began offering cooking internships, where employees spend a day with the 50-member kitchen staff learning how to blacken chicken or chop basil.
Offering free food, and copious amounts of it, is part of Facebook’s strategy to encourage employees to work long hours. A significant number of the 800 employees at the company’s main campus are in their early 20s, fresh off their college years where they pulled all-nighters and hung out talking in their dorm rooms. Facebook is famous for its regular “hackathons,” where employees are invited to stay up all night and work on programs and platforms that are not part of their normal assignments; the kitchen staff participates by creating new dishes that are served at midnight, 3 a.m. and at breakfast time.
In short, food is a lubricant that helps keep the innovation machine running.
Or breakfast. Fred Labbe, a credit analyst who arrives at work at 5:45 a.m. to reach the European markets, said he ate at least two meals a day at Facebook. “The food is fantastic,” Mr. Labbe said one recent morning as he savored a plate of scrambled eggs and a bagel smothered in glistening pink lox.
In the six months since he started at Facebook, Mr. Labbe said, he has put on at least four pounds — a problem so common that employees joke about gaining the “Facebook 15” after they begin work at the company.
Gaining weight is not the only downside to unlimited, high-quality food at the workplace.
“If you make work too convenient, too appealing, that becomes your life,” said Jan English-Lueck, a professor of anthropology at San Jose State University who has studied Silicon Valley culture. “It could be seen as this odd kind of golden cage that pulls people into work and keeps them totally tethered to it. Whether that’s a drawback or not depends on people’s perspective.”
Costs are also a consideration. Facebook, which opened its current cafe in May, will not comment on how much it costs to run. The company has said it expects to bring in more than $500 million in revenue this year.
Lucasfilm, Autodesk and Apple subsidize employees’ meals, but other companies have concluded that offering free food is not worth the expense. Cisco, which is sitting on $35 billion in cash, nevertheless decided in 2008 that the $20 million a year it was spending on free bottled water and soft drinks could be used more wisely elsewhere, said John Earnhardt, a Cisco spokesman.
Lance Choy, the director of the career development center at Stanford, said students did not accept jobs because of the quality of a company’s food.
“They are more attuned to Facebook or Google because they are cool organizations and do cool things,” Mr. Choy said. “I know once they get there, though, they are happy about the food.”
Ms. Loughlin said the quality of the food at Facebook was integral to attracting top employees. The company’s job site, in fact, says food “may be our most awesome perk.” When people come to interview, they are almost always served lunch, she said.
The cooking internship, which drew 40 applicants for six spots minutes after it was announced on the cafe’s Facebook fan page, allows selected employees to suggest a menu and then cook it.
Oliver Louie, an in-house lawyer chosen for the program, showed up at 7 a.m. at the company’s gleaming industrial kitchen on a rainy day in early December. Mr. Louie met up with Mr. Desimone and Dana Shepard, the kitchen manager, and in the course of five hours, he learned to sauté blackened chicken breasts, barbecue sausages, chop basil without bruising it, fry textured vegetable protein wheat balls and arrange condiments attractively.
“We get to enjoy the benefits every day,” he said, “but we don’t get to see the process. Working on this side gives me a whole new appreciation of that side.”
As Mr. Louie navigated the grills, cooktops and ovens, Mr. Desimone not only oversaw the cooking of lunch, but also the preparation of the dinner for eight he would serve that night for the woman who ate the company’s 500,000th meal. He planned to offer hamachi carpaccio, butterfish with morel mushroom ravioli, seared foie gras and apple-braised pork belly.
While that dinner would be special, Mr. Desimone said, all of the meals at Facebook used the freshest ingredients. He said he tried to use meat from animals that had not been exposed to antibiotics or genetically modified feed; organic produce; milk and butter from local purveyors like Strauss Dairy and Clover Farms; and live-caught or sustainable fish. Mr. Desimone uses eight kinds of salt in his cooking, including kosher salt he roasts in the enormous steel smoker next to the barbeque in a backyard.
Each lunch and dinner, the cafe offers a vegetarian or vegan entree; two main courses of meat, chicken or fish; a salad bar; two types of soup; and two desserts made by the pastry chef, Shannon Burum. All are served in orange or blue Le Creuset pans rather than in the rectangular steel pans normally used in cafeterias. Snacks, served from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., are especially popular on Thursdays when Mr. Desimone serves nachos. Mini-kitchens are also scattered throughout the building where people can pick up snacks and salads when the cafe is closed.
For a chef used to working long hours, a job at a place like Facebook Cafe offers new freedoms and chances to experiment.
“I love this gig,” Mr. Desimone said. “I get to change the menu every day. I get to make everything from scratch. I get holidays and weekends off. There aren’t a lot of chefs in that position.”
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