In the first installment of this series, we outlined a shift that, while technical on paper, is beginning to reshape how companies think about workplace food programs in practice.
The removal of the 50% tax deduction for employer-provided meals has increased the true cost of feeding employees. For many companies, that translates to an immediate 10–12% increase in program cost.
We talked with Sifted's finance and analytics director, Cody Legge, to understand this from a finance lens.
As budgets tighten and CFOs take a closer look, workplace food which has been treated as a fixed cultural investment, is now being evaluated as an operating expense that must justify itself. This pressure will show up as questions about efficiency, utilization, and waste, explains Legge.
At a glance, most workplace food programs appear straightforward: determine headcount, set a budget per meal, and serve accordingly.
Across Sifted’s client base, one pattern shows up consistently, regardless of industry, geography, or company size: daily attendance fluctuates far more than most teams expect. On any given day, actual in-office presence can swing by as much as 30% above or below the average.
This variability is norm in hybrid workplaces.
Yet many programs are still designed around static headcount. They plan for 800 because 800 are assigned to the office, even if only 500–600 show up on a typical day. The result is predictable: overproduction, excess food, and a level of waste that is often invisible in reporting but very real in cost.
Before the tax change, that inefficiency was partially offset. Without the tax deduction, it will be fully exposed.
The removal of the deduction does not change how food is prepared or consumed. It changes how inefficiency is felt.
A program that was already overproducing does not suddenly become inefficient in 2026. It already was. What changes is that the financial cushion is gone. Waste that was previously softened by tax treatment now flows directly through the P&L.
This is why the impact of the policy will not be evenly distributed:
Programs that are tightly managed, aligned to actual consumption,
and designed with variability in mind will absorb the change.
Programs that rely on static assumptions will feel a disproportionate increase in cost.
In other words, the tax change is not just increasing costs. It is exposing which programs were never optimized to begin with.
For companies that offer workplace food as a meaningful part of their employee experience, a new tension will emerge.
The program still matters, but it is now more expensive to operate inefficiently.
As finance teams begin to model this change, workplace food will increasingly be scrutinized alongside other major operating expenses.