On Glassdoor, the site in which human beings can price and review workplaces anonymously, a Google employee starts a listing of “execs” with: “Food, meals, food.”
“Food galore,” says every other reviewer. “Everyone gains the Google 15,” jokes but another. Even a less effusive evaluator notes: “Snacks brilliant. Retirement plan no longer so correct.”
As city legend has it, Google co-founder Sergey Brin once told workplace architects that “no person has to be greater than two hundred toes far from food.” And so they not often are. On any given day, the 1, three hundred “micro kitchens” placed inside Google’s 70 or so offices around the sector, from Pittsburgh to Istanbul, brim with dried seaweed, turkey jerky, kombucha, and different eclectic treats that rotate in line with the season, popularity with personnel, neighborhood tastes, and meals traits.
Google takes its snacking very critically. That’s why it has a devoted team overseeing it and a chef named Matt Colgan on the helm at a lot of its western campuses, where he (at the side of menu architects, wellbeing managers, and nutrition professionals at Google Food) has quietly emerged as one of the most powerful gatekeepers inside the packaged-meals international.
“When you’re feeding this many people,” says Colgan, culinary director for Google’s food operations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Colorado, “you encounter every weight loss program possible, each request.” You also get bombarded through income reps at meal corporations, who’re hungering after snackers—and those snackers especially. They see Google personnel, the drivers of Silicon Valley tech innovation, as having the clout, and urge for food, to set snack tendencies.
Colgan doesn’t technically paintings for Google. He’s hired with the aid of ISS Guckenheimer, one of the meals-offerings companies that Google companions with. But Colgan’s activity is to oversee the sourcing and education of freshly cooked breakfasts, lunches, and dinners at his Google workplaces each day—in addition to the snack inventory inside the micro kitchens. All of this food is unfastened for Google personnel, who enjoy the identical selections regardless of wherein they stand at the personnel ladder. At the Google headquarters on my own (aka Googleplex, aka Mountain View, aka MTV), for instance, there are 23,000 rumbling stomachs to feed.
Colgan is a Bay Area native who has warm reminiscences of waking as much as oatmeal and fresh muffins made through his grandmother, and who spent some of his formative culinary years in Europe, shucking oysters in Ireland and learning approximately eclectic herbs in Tuscany earlier than returning to California to become executive chef at the Oakland small-plates eating place À Côté.
For “Guckenheimer@Google,” because the partnership is thought, Colgan keenly video display units meals tendencies. He visits alternate gala’s, including the yearly Fancy Food Show, wherein providers tempt buyers with more than eighty 000 unique food and beverage products in San Francisco. In June, he attended the Menus of Change Conference in New York, which featured panel discussions on flexitarian diets, sustainable but delicious carbohydrates, and the effect of weather exchange on meals.
He additionally gets lobbied through meal vendors, both huge and small. “Different corporations are always coming around, especially individuals who are doing something new and innovative,” he says. “They really need to discover a manner to get in front of you, and have you ever attempt their snacks.”
