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Key Takeaways
- Google’s consideration to element extends to their worker meals program — a seemingly small perk with main implications.
- Google makes use of AI to attenuate waste, maximize worth and make real-time selections about what works with regards to feeding its staff.
- Google views its meals program as an funding in creating casual areas the place collaboration occurs naturally.
Meals was by no means a perk at Google. It was a wager on how folks work.
When Helen Wechsler, Senior Director, Meals Program CoE at Google, talks concerning the firm’s meals program, she doesn’t body it as a profit designed to impress.
As an alternative, she frames it as tradition. From the earliest days, meals have been how the authentic Google group gathered, talked and constructed belief. Lengthy earlier than sprawling campuses or polished cafes, meals was the factor that introduced them collectively and stored them there.
At the moment, Google offers meals and entry to meals for workers throughout its places of work worldwide. Cafes, micro kitchens on each ground, espresso and tea bars, instructing kitchens and even meals vehicles are a part of how the corporate feeds its folks. The size is very large, however Wechsler is evident that feeding staff shouldn’t be about abundance.
“Now we have a captive viewers,” she says. “We’re feeding folks each day, and that comes with a very weighty duty.”
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That duty is obvious instantly in Google’s New York Metropolis places of work, the place I interviewed Wechsler. She supplied me a few of the spa water— I couldn’t imagine how good it was.
For Wechsler, that response is strictly the purpose. “We simply wished folks to drink extra water,” she explains. “Spa water is an effective method to do this.”
It sounds easy, nearly insignificant. However these small selections are deliberate. Hydration stations that really feel inviting. Particulars that spark curiosity. Moments that sluggish folks down simply sufficient to really feel cared for. When meals is free, indifference is the best failure. Wechsler calls it the shrug. Google refuses that method.
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“We wish to be that pleasure within the day,” she says. “We wish it to really feel seamless.”
Hospitality, on this context, shouldn’t be transactional. It’s relational. Meals turns into the cultural connector inside a extremely technical atmosphere. A reminder that irrespective of how superior the work turns into, folks nonetheless come collectively the identical method they all the time have.
Over a meal.
Expertise that cares
At Google’s scale, good intentions usually are not sufficient.
Feeding folks effectively requires programs that may soak up uncertainty, adapt rapidly and nonetheless depart room for care. Expertise is what makes that attainable — it protects hospitality at scale.
“Expertise is your finest buddy in the event you use it accurately,” she says. “It helps you consider, helps you expect, helps you assume differently.”
That philosophy shapes how Google approaches AI. The meals group shouldn’t be chasing automation for its personal sake or searching for excellent solutions. They’re experimenting. Testing. Studying in public. AI turns into a software to stretch considering fairly than slim it.
“Play with it,” she says. “Use it, use it, use it.”
That mindset issues as a result of Google operates with a stage of unpredictability most eating places by no means face. There is no such thing as a register. No ordering funnel. No dependable approach to know who will stroll in on any given day. Folks come and go freely, which makes meals waste a continuing concern.
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Over the previous eight years, know-how has helped carry readability to that chaos. Menu administration programs, recipe scaling and pre- and post-production data permit groups to check what they anticipated to serve with what was really eaten. The true breakthrough got here when the information grew to become visible.
“Till we began measuring it visually, it didn’t stick,” Wechsler says.
At the moment, waste is photographed, weighed and logged routinely. Pictures acknowledge the meals, join it to menus, and floor patterns that cooks can really act on. If one thing constantly comes again untouched, it sparks a dialog. Perhaps the recipe is unsuitable. Perhaps the timing is off. Perhaps it merely doesn’t resonate.
Expertise additionally helps creativity. Trim turns into spa water. Fruit scraps flip into new drinks. Extra substances discover second lives in jams, chutneys or solely new dishes. Measurement doesn’t kill creativeness. It fuels it.
The lesson for eating places watching from the skin is straightforward. Expertise ought to make folks calmer, not busier. Extra considerate, no more reactive. When used effectively, it offers groups the area to care higher.
Hospitality nonetheless belongs to people. Expertise simply helps them see what issues.
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Key Takeaways
- Google’s consideration to element extends to their worker meals program — a seemingly small perk with main implications.
- Google makes use of AI to attenuate waste, maximize worth and make real-time selections about what works with regards to feeding its staff.
- Google views its meals program as an funding in creating casual areas the place collaboration occurs naturally.
Meals was by no means a perk at Google. It was a wager on how folks work.
When Helen Wechsler, Senior Director, Meals Program CoE at Google, talks concerning the firm’s meals program, she doesn’t body it as a profit designed to impress.
