Ask most HR or finance teams what employees leaving the building for lunch costs the business, and you'll get a shrug. It's invisible — no line item, no measurement, no obvious counterfactual. But the maths is simple, and the numbers are bigger than people expect.
The simple model
Consider a 200-person office. On a typical Wednesday, 70% of staff leave the building for lunch. The round trip — walk out, queue, walk back — averages 40 minutes, of which roughly 25 minutes is unproductive time beyond the lunch break they'd take anyway.
That's 140 people × 25 minutes = 58 hours of working time lost in one day. Across a year, working from a 220-day estimate at the same attendance, you're talking about ~12,800 hours — equivalent to roughly 7 full-time staff.
Why this is conservative
The model above ignores the cost staff carry themselves: £8–£15 per lunch in London, £6–£10 outside. Over a year, that's £1,800–£3,300 per employee, post-tax, on lunch alone. The morale cost when local prices climb is real.
It also ignores the attendance question. In a hybrid world, anything that makes office days less pleasant — long lunch queues, expensive sandwiches, no decent options — moves marginal in-office days back to home.
The on-site alternative
Workplace food infrastructure — a managed smart fridge with chef-made meals delivered multiple times a week, loaded on-site by a designated contact, with snacks and drinks loaded by Compound — cuts the round trip from 40 minutes to about 5. Purchases run through an app, so there's no queue.
On the same 200-person office, shifting half of those lunch trips to on-site recovers roughly 4 FTE worth of working time per year. Even at a generous per-item subsidy, the model usually pays back inside the first quarter on time alone.
How to think about it commercially
Most companies don't account for lunchtime time loss because they can't see it. Once they do, the conversation about on-site food shifts — it stops being a perks cost line and starts looking like a productivity intervention with a measurable return.
Compound runs free scoping calls to model this for specific sites. The numbers are usually larger than the team expects.
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