Science parks and research campuses have the hardest food-access problem in UK commercial real estate. They're often miles from a high street. Researchers work long, unpredictable hours. PhD students and lab technicians are on-site at 7am and 9pm. Tenants are heterogeneous — biotech start-ups next to multinational R&D centres next to spin-outs of three people. No single café will ever serve them all.
Why traditional catering fails on science parks
Cafés need predictable, concentrated lunchtime footfall. Research campuses generate the opposite: dispersed buildings, staggered hours, fewer Monday-to-Friday rhythms, lots of late-evening and weekend work. Open hours never match when people actually want food.
The result is the pattern most parks know well — a café that opens 11–2 weekdays, struggles to break even, closes early, and leaves the rest of the day with no on-site option.
What's working instead
Workplace food infrastructure sited across the park: managed smart fridges in key buildings, stocked with chef-made meals delivered multiple times a week. A designated on-site contact (often a building manager or facilities lead) loads the meals as deliveries arrive. Compound loads snacks and drinks directly. All purchases run through an app, which means the units operate 24/7 with no staffing.
Critically, the model scales with the building. A 40-person spin-out doesn't need its own café; it needs reliable access to a fridge that's stocked properly. A 400-person R&D centre can have its own unit.
Who pays for it
On most science parks, this is funded by the park operator or building owner as a tenant amenity — sometimes fully, sometimes at partial subsidy with tenant staff paying the difference in-app. Larger tenants occasionally fund their own units inside their footprint. The model is flexible.
Why it matters for wellbeing and retention
Researcher wellbeing is now a recruitment and retention conversation, not just a welfare one. Reliable access to proper food — at 8am, at 2pm, at 9pm — shows up in staff surveys, recruitment conversations and the way teams talk about the park.
It's also one of the few amenity investments that visibly serves the people the park is trying to attract: scientists, engineers, technicians, students.
Getting started
Compound runs free scoping calls with science park operators — typically we look at building mix, headcount, hours of operation and current food access across the site. From conversation to first install is usually 2–4 weeks.
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