


9 Oct 2025 · 35m · 15 chapters

How food “holds culture together” at work—creating community, autonomy, identity, and emotional connection—plus practical ways employers can use food perks and office food moments to strengthen workplace culture.
Spencer Walker, Deliveroo. Leads corporate B2B at Deliveroo for Work; previously ran Deliveroo’s London business (worked with restaurants like Dishoom, Farmer, Pizza Pilgrims). Earlier career: drummer in an international touring rock band; later pivoted into startup-style tech entrepreneurship.
Food is emotional (not just transactional like many perks) and enables better conversations when people break from work. Allowances and choice outperform generic canteen approaches; employees value food perks highly (rated as high as health/dental, twice gym subsidies). Sharing food moments (e.g., Friday lunch) builds non-hierarchical connection.
Friday lunch “sacred” at Deliveroo; Slack “Food Nerds” channel with data-driven restaurant recommendations; focus group stories (Tamil food as a “hug” when homesick; Singaporean food cravings); Deliveroo for Work group lunches/flowers/pantry restock on one invoice.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Spencer Walker shares his journey from being a drummer to working at Deliveroo.
“Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com.”
Spencer Walker shares his journey from being a drummer to working at Deliveroo.
Spencer Walker shares his journey from being a drummer to working at Deliveroo.
“He's going to give us a perspective of food, the role it plays inside organizations.”
Explaining the services and benefits of Deliveroo for Work in corporate settings.
“Talk to me what you learned about being in a band first.”
Spencer discusses strategies for creating a strong team culture at Deliveroo.
“So yeah, there's a there's an expense streamlining service that's really helpful.”
The importance of food in fostering connections and culture in the workplace.
“And, you know, that's been from Will, our founder, all the way down, you know, for all the time that I've been there.”
Exploring how food fosters connections among colleagues, including specific initiatives.
“every Friday, we'd have about five or six buckets of KFC wings arrived in the office.”
Learn how food acts as a conduit for connection and identity in the workplace.
“And you'll just have this like really personal context.”
Discover the importance of personalized food choices for employee satisfaction.
“We think about kind of nostalgic flavors and tastes.”
Food benefits are rated as highly as health perks by employees.
“I took a look at that and actually it's fascinating to explore it.”
Understand how food can enhance team dynamics and workplace belonging.
“If you think about workplace, I don't think this is necessarily a generational thing.”
Learn how sharing meals can enhance workplace relationships and productivity.
“If you're sitting remotely, you choose a time.”
Discover how food choices can promote health and well-being for employees.
“It's a thing, you know, you just will turn up and he'll be like, try this, try this.”
Explore how employers can adapt to changing employee expectations regarding food and engagement.
“of thinking about, you know, delivery equals unhealthy, home cooking equals healthy.”
Explore how employers can adapt to changing employee expectations regarding food and engagement.
“Thank you to Spencer for joining me for that promoted episode, promoted in association with Deliveroo for Work.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:00Brett Harding: Still waiting in line?
0:02Spencer Walker: Again?
0:03Brett Harding: That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply.
0:39Spencer Walker: this is eat sleep work repeat it's a podcast about workplace culture now one of the themes we've returned to a lot recurrently over the last few years is discussions about food as something that creates culture something that holds culture together the benefits of sort of breaking bread and getting together with teams i wanted to dive into that a bit more because it's one of the areas that people really get in touch with stories and anecdotes about their own experience. So to do that, I thought I would track down a great guest who would give me some more on that. Today, I'm going to be talking to Spencer Walker from Deliveroo.
1:13Spencer Walker: He's going to give us a perspective of food, the role it plays inside organizations. I wonder if to kick off then, Spencer, you could introduce far better than I've done. You could introduce who you are and what you to?
1:25Brett Harding: Yeah, cool. Thanks for having me. So my name is Spencer. I am at Deliveroo, been there about eight and a half years. I currently lead a corporate B2B business, which is Deliveroo for work. We then before that, I ran our London business for about four years. So signing and working with restaurants that people certainly in London may know and love like Dishoum or Farmer or Pizza Pilgrims. And then before that, I was a drummer in an international touring rock band. Right, hang on, that's too good to pass up.
2:01Spencer Walker: So go on, talk me through what you went from being in a rock band to working corporate life. Talk to me what you learned about being in a band first.
2:11Brett Harding: Yeah, so I think it might be generous to be calling Deliveroo a corporate at this point. But I think if you, yeah, it was definitely a pivot. I think if you think about Deliveroo more as a startup, it probably makes more sense. So the first thing is that anyone who has ever tried to start a band will know that actually it's really entrepreneurial. You have to be. And without giving away my age, it was even more entrepreneurial back then when, you know, to get a gig that involved standing in a phone box and basically getting a yellow pages and ringing every single person connected to a venue that you could possibly find in order to try and get someone to give you a gig.
2:54Brett Harding: So there was a lot of hustle involved. You really had to want it. We then we particularly did things in a very DIY way. So we self-produced, we self-recorded, we built our own studio in the garden of the house we lived in. And we also then ended up taking that one step further and really modeling the band as a startup business. So I went out and raised investment and we ran everything very self-contained, didn't work with really any labels. um and so like the transition then was not quite as extreme as possibly it sounds if you just think about being a drummer to then going and working in a startup and i think i think from a tech perspective it's also interesting because we were there right at this tipping point from analog to digital both in terms of recording in terms of music consumption and in terms of all the kind of social media and everything that went around music at the time i get that i get and i get
3:58Spencer Walker: actually thinking about it as a startup you see how musical apps use social media now exactly like a startup so you're now working at delivery for work do you want to explain to us what delivery
4:07Brett Harding: for work is yeah so uh delivery probably everyone knows what that is delivery for work is a uh you're kind of at work food perk provider so at core like like a lot of great products it's a really simple product um we have an allowance functionality which means that if you're a business you can become a client of Deliveroo for Work, and you can give your employees an allowance. Now, that could be used for a multitude of things, but one example could be if you have lots of people who do late night working, for example, banks, professional services, law firms, consultancies, etc. Instead of then having hundreds and hundreds of expenses to pull together and to go through at the end of a month, you can just use, you know, your employees will have an allowance, they'll toggle it on charges to the company, they'll get their food, and then the company just has one invoice at the end of the month.
5:00Brett Harding: So yeah, there's a there's an expense streamlining service that's really helpful. But the other cool thing, and maybe one that is more on the topic of what we're going to talk about today, is that you can also use it for lots of other things. So we have a lot of clients that use us for group lunches for team lunches, or even for then things in the office that really enhance culture. Like, for example, you know, we have florists now on the platform. So we have companies that use us to send fresh flowers on a Monday. We do pantry restock. If I think about my first, my only real temp job before I went full-time into music after university, I was the guy in the office who had to go and get the milk every day.
5:43Brett Harding: And I had to go and get petty cash and then go and buy milk. And then I came back and I had to get a receipt and I had to process it in a certain way. You know, now we just live in a world where you could put late night working, team lunches, flowers, milk, all on one invoice that comes at the end of the month and it just kind of makes everyone's life easier. And I guess a lot of those things
6:03Spencer Walker: are sort of some of the ways that we might bring the day-to-day experience of work to life. Can I ask before we go into a discussion about some of the ways that you do that, can I ask how you think about creating culture in your own team? how you think about sort of building a delivery for work culture as a leader yourself.
6:22Brett Harding: Yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting coming into this role, which I did about a couple of years ago. So I'd actually formed what I think was a good kind of thriving culture in my team before, but it was a bit easier because everyone was in the same place. All of my people were in London and we all worked together and there was a lot of FaceTime and you could get everyone in a room if you needed to so it just made it that little bit easier to manage i'll give you an example which sounds incredibly dry but i think is actually quite good and important so when i moved into this role where i have teams in all of the markets delivery operates so you know the majority of my team sits outside of the uk or outside of london um i actually really struggled all the things all all the things that have worked really well in London, uh, didn't seem to work so well, um, when applied to a global team.
7:17Brett Harding: And I had a really, uh, great reverse, reverse mentoring moment where, uh, someone I mentored, I was telling him about this challenge. Uh, and he recommended me a book, uh, called the culture map by Aaron Meyer, which I found really useful. Um, and he had found useful. and this was a good gateway to me then thinking about communication and different styles and how clearly you know English people maybe particularly we communicate in a very weird way where obviously I love when you actually translate a lot of things that people think English people are saying and it's normally nothing like what we're actually saying and so what I started doing with my team is I send a newsletter every Friday.
8:04Brett Harding: So every Friday afternoon, without fail, I send a newsletter that summarizes things that have happened that week, great work that's happened, recognize people who've done great work, use it to reinforce messages, mostly to reinforce the context behind why we're doing what we're doing. And actually, I guess the main thing that I think we've achieved with this is consistency. And what we have at Deliveroo is we operate in an incredibly fast-paced, really ambiguous, often, environment. Something that really helps my team and really helps me is consistency and stability when it comes to culture. And so they know that this is coming every week.
8:52Brett Harding: No one replies. Definitely thought for a while no one was reading it. But when I go and visit markets, the first thing anyone will tell me is we love that you send that email every week just like it keeps us in contact with everything we know what's going on and it's become a real sort of cultural calling card and i'll often talk about what i'm cooking for dinner that night as well or what the kids have been winding
9:15Spencer Walker: me up about that brings me onto the idea of culture being sort of um held together quite often by food or by big significant contributions that that food has to cultures and obviously that's the business you're in do you practice any of that yourself do you use food yourself to try and hold the culture together to get to create moments of togetherness or do you use
9:38Brett Harding: food like that yeah i think we like food is food is at the heart of everything we do at Deliveroo it's the thread that runs through the whole business. And, you know, that's been from Will, our founder, all the way down, you know, for all the time that I've been there. You know, to the point where on our office wall, there is just a massive neon sign saying, always be eating. You know, it might be weird for people who think less about food, but we think about food a lot. One of the things that I think if you were to ask anyone who's been at Deliveroo over the years, They would talk about Friday lunch, which was kind of a legendary thing.
10:19Brett Harding: So when I joined, we'd actually get to lunchtime on Friday. Usually at that point, usually all of us would then have to go out and do deliveries in central London because we probably couldn't get enough riders out on the road to deal with Peak. And so you'd have lots of delivery employees going out and we'd do some orders. And that was great. And you'd also obviously get all the benefits of primary research. And you'd get close to the customer and that was all good. and then you'd come back to the office and um there would just be a mountain of food from our restaurant partners and it just was this i mean like it was sorry on the one hand it was like the hunger games it was relentless and hilarious to watch and quite intimidating probably for anyone who was new certainly was for me when i joined uh and you had to have sharp elbows but the best thing about it is you had this amazing really non-hierarchical you know everyone talking to everyone about food uh just obsessing about like what is this thing you have to try this you meet people from different teams and you just take that moment where everyone comes together and they have that kind of release after a long week you then go back and finish the week but it was it was such a key cultural moment for us and you know that's continued and over time as we've got bigger it's evolved and now actually we use kind of the the delivery for work product everyone gets to choose their own thing okay i think that was an interesting shift when that happened definitely some oldies who you know we maybe lamented the loss of this quite weird moment but fundamentally when you have kind of a thousand people trying to go for the same burgers it does actually get uh potentially dangerous at that point so you know we now all order our own thing but everyone still comes together to eat uh and it is a moment in the week where no matter what market you're in you know that's Friday lunch is sort of sacred at Deliveroo.
12:10Spencer Walker: Right I remember reading a book by Robin Dunbar and Samantha Rockne that talked about how they ran dinners as part of like a leadership program they did and they specifically ensured that they had they had curry actually but they specifically used sharing dishes because they knew those interactions of people passing things to each other it's just all of them added little moments of connection and that idea of using food for team connection and team community seems to be a real important part of the role that food can play i talked to someone at radio one who talked about like they had these pizza evenings and you know i've talked many times about um crisp thursday which was one business i i met that just introduced 4 30 on thursday they came together and they had some pringles we did look i mean that
12:56Brett Harding: definitely right we didn't do crisps but if i think back there was a good three or four years where 11 a.m. every Friday, we'd have about five or six buckets of KFC wings arrived in the office. And I assume that was Will ordering them. I actually don't know who ordered them. But that became a thing where it was just kind of, and you know, that was probably back when it was a younger company and maybe Thursday night had been a little heavier. So, you know, your Friday morning wings, it didn't matter actually who you were. Everyone went and got a wing because it was also just that moment where you come together, people talk about what did they do yesterday?
13:29Brett Harding: They look forward to what's going to happen. and they'd talk about what they're going to order for Friday lunch. And we had that. We have food at every event we do. And then actually, a really interesting one, which those are all things that fundamentally the business is investing in food. Where I think it gets really interesting is where food then becomes a really organic part of the culture, and it's adding to the culture without actually that investment. We have a Slack channel called Food Nerds. food nerds is pretty much the most engaged with channel at deliveroo and it is just restaurant recommendations but again it's this like magical place where if you want a recommendation for any city in the world you will find it in food nerds to the point where last time i went in there i think the data science team has actually now uh got it uh integrated with looker so you know we use looker you can actually go in there and run a search and you can say uh i'm going to marseilles next week, pull up all recommendations from the past, you know, 10 years for Marseille.
14:32Brett Harding: And you'll just have this like really personal context. And it leads to these interactions where you look and you've got CFO talking to software engineer, talking to person and operations team, all connecting and meeting at this one level through this kind of shared love of food.
14:51Spencer Walker: Because aside from that discovery part, I get that, you know, it's sort of part of making the places we go seem richer. But couldn't you potentially say if I was being provocative, well, look, you know, you've recognised the value of food. Yeah, what you should do here is invest in that having your own on site canteen. You know, to some extent, isn't this just the use case for having a canteen?
15:11Brett Harding: Yeah, I think, look, first thing is for some businesses that will be viable, for some it won't. But I think what I like about this point is the idea of how a business sets up their office to enable this coming together through food. And so if I think, again, to start with our office, you know, we're very lucky, we have an office right on the Thames, it's very cool, we've got two floors, you know, the prime real estate in that office is the windows that look out in the river, and on both floors, that is like, that is all kitchen, you know, That is not someone's office. It's not the CEO's office and the CFO's office.
15:54Brett Harding: It's just massive, really nicely laid out kitchen spaces. And they are the focal points of our office. So even though we don't have a canteen, I think if you're a company thinking about this, the first thing I would think about is what does your shared space look like? What have you got there to enable people to actually eat and come together? It sounds simple, but do you have plates? Do you have forks? Do you have like condiments? Do you make it somewhere where you're encouraging them to come and spend time and connect? And then, you know, I think there's a there's a second point more specifically on the canteen, which is I think if you're a business, ask your employees.
16:35Brett Harding: You know, we, and I think we'll talk a little bit about the rapport we've done, but in that report, one of the things we asked employees at a wide range of clients was, you know, how do you rate, what would your preferred at work food experience be? And, you know, it came back pretty clearly that delivered food was three times more preferable than a canteen. And then I think, you know, what you potentially miss with a canteen is this idea of autonomy and maybe a bit more agency about the choice and selection of food. and while having food is good and having a space is good there is this kind of secret source where you give people the choice of what they can bring to the office uh that i think unlocks even more uh cultural kind of engagement benefits okay that's interesting because like whenever i
17:35Spencer Walker: think of culture i think community i think autonomy i think identity and so you know so the fact that to some extent the community comes baked in this is the moment you're sitting down you're taking time to eat food uh the autonomy the idea that you're choosing the food yourself plays a plays a big part in that is there an element of identity there is there an element of i'm just thinking you know we use pizza as a celebration food don't we but yeah can it go beyond that can can food be a signifier of identity i just top of my head i think my grandmother was german and uh she used to be insistent that we eat german sausage all the time because it was a way to signal that like our germanness was there vegetarian now it's sort of it had a unexpected consequence but you know i food as a signifier of identity seems a really important thing and i just wonder if that contributes to how we use food as a cultural vehicle.
18:35Brett Harding: Yeah, I think it's a great show. And I'm sad that you no longer get to enjoy the German sausages of your youth. I think when we think about food, we often seek out food that reminds us of home. We think about kind of nostalgic flavors and tastes. And this really actually came to life recently. A couple of months ago, we had a focus group come into the office. So employees of clients that we work with, who we invited in to kind of just talk about their at work food experiences, their use of the product, you know, always looking to learn from from the customer. And there was this amazing session where there was a lady who was a banker, worked in an investment bank.
19:21Brett Harding: And she she talked about we asked her to tell us about what's a good example of what's an example of a good at work food experience. and she talked about a day when she'd been feeling she was just feeling really low she's feeling really homesick uh and she just wanted um tamil cuisine that's what she wanted she wanted something that would remind her of home and she has an allowance she went on to live a rue and we you know by chance had you know recently signed a a restaurant called carapincha in canary wharf she ordered from carapinture and you know she said this felt like a hug it just felt like being at home and it gave me something on that day and then there was another person in the focus group who immediately piped up and said i know exactly what you mean when i ordered in typhoon it makes me think of my food that i had back in singapore and i think that like the point here is that you know when you when you give employees the ability to bring to bring to order their own food to bring their own food to work and to showcase that and to enjoy it they get to actually bring um something that is really relevant to them and it's it's really catering to that individual rather than you trying to second guess what you think will be most meaningful for them in this moment it is really unlikely that anyone in the organization would know that tamil food at that time is what that person needed to get through the day but they'd enabled her to actually make that choice because of the decision she was able to make with that food perk.
21:01Brett Harding: And I think the second thing that's really interesting about it is there's a really nice inclusivity point here, which is by enabling people to bring their own food that reminds them of home and to really represent their own culture, it brings them together with their team. And what we hear when we talk to employees about this is they say, it helps them to feel It helps them feel seen and it helps them to feel recognized. To get back to your pizza point, I would encourage any team leader out there who instinctively orders pizzas for the team when they're celebrating something to really think about who's in their team.
21:43Brett Harding: You know, 40 % of London professionals were not born in London. It's entirely possible that, well, I love a pizza. Doesn't mean you love a pizza, Bruce. And it doesn't mean, you know, the next person might not actually want to celebrate with dim sum or the next person might want to celebrate with something else. And actually, you know, really leaning into that would create not only this opportunity to celebrate with food, but to also celebrate in a really inclusive way with your team.
22:09Spencer Walker: Right. Almost like you could you could run something like sort of like the bake sale aesthetic where different groups say we want to bring this cuisine to the event.
22:19Brett Harding: yeah and actually even you know gets back to the the core thing uh that we usually get back to which is like talk to your team ask them you know the default so many times we default to these things especially at work it's you know this idea of you know pizza celebration it is really ingrained and if there are any pizza partners i've worked with obviously i love pizza just throwing it out there love uh lots of our pizza restaurants uh but there are other things and there are things that may be more meaningful.
22:47Spencer Walker: Now you put out this feeding employee engagement report. I took a look at that and actually it's fascinating to explore it. But if you were going to call out a couple of the big headlines, what do you think for you stands out as the big findings of that report?
23:00Brett Harding: Yeah, I think if I was to, you know, if I was to pick one, it would be, and really one of the reasons we put it out there, because I think we were a bit surprised by some of the things that we heard from employees. The one that really stuck with me was when they were asked to rate their perks. Employees were rating food perks as highly as health and dental benefits and twice as high as gym subsidies. And while I am someone who has never been to a gym, uh i'm not a gym guy uh that did surprise me because when i think about what i hear on the desks and when i've kind of looked at conventional rewards packages i feel like gym is a pretty solid nailed on uh thing that companies will go to and i also think that the uh the the health and dental benefits being kind of ranked at the same level we possibly hints at a second thing which is this, is there a slight shift in generational viewpoints on what is perceived to be valuable versus what may have previously been perceived to be valuable?
24:14Spencer Walker: I saw Gen Zs were really interested in food as a benefit. And I just wondered whether it was part of that TikTokification of work because people now are seeing other people's work experience to a greater extent than ever before, that if you've got one friend in 20 who gets food provided, then suddenly that becomes like social currency it becomes you know an illustration that there may be in the office two days or three days but this food provided there or whatever it is it just something that was was really hitting with gen z's as they were coming into the workplace
24:45Brett Harding: yeah i think that's i think that's spot on and i think the um i think what what we what we see coming through from that uh demographic is and and to be clear i think it's when i say that we've also got to be very careful about i think gen z people talk a lot about gen z and they like to think about the whole of gen z together and i feel like there's a you know this is not a an idea that all people in gen z are the same um what we do see is that there is definitely more of a desire for personalization of perks um maybe people being slightly less content with the idea of quite generic memberships and benefits um we see more of a sort of sharper focus on women's health we see more of a focus on um shared parental policies uh even people being more vocal about what they want to see in terms of workplace setup a workplace that is geared towards movement and collaboration um but i also think what's what's quite interesting about this personalization point, food being a good example, is I'm not sure I can, I think it's hard to in some ways disagree with this, right?
26:04Brett Harding: If you think about workplace, I don't think this is necessarily a generational thing. I think we've just got potentially a group of people who are now feeling more empowered to actually talk about what they want rather than just accept what is given. And, you know, if you think about workplace perks, that is part of your overall reward given to you by a company. There will always be perks that don't resonate or are irrelevant or not appropriate for some people in a team or in a workforce. I don't think it's crazy that we should try and think about perks that really do speak to more people. And I don't think that's necessarily a particularly generational point.
26:48Spencer Walker: Yeah, it's a really interesting challenge because quite often, you know, we try to separate and we say, look, perks do not necessarily equal a straight line through to better culture. Like if you dial up the travel allowance or if you dial up specific things, it normally doesn't have a straight line correlation. But the interesting thing about food is that potentially it sits slightly aside from that. Through those things you've mentioned, you're achieving a goal obliquely of getting teams to sit down and build community. They sort of come together. There's that autonomy element where people feel like they're making decisions themselves.
27:23Spencer Walker: That identity element, you know, probably the third contribution, people feeling like this is something they're able to have an impact on themselves. So it seems like it's an untypical perk to some extent because it does achieve some of your cultural goals. I guess you as a leader, you see that yourself. Do you use food yourself internally?
27:46Brett Harding: I mean, yeah, it is literally the default, right? If all else fails, I think, what can we do? How do we just bring people together around a table? Whether it's a cake, whether it's biscuits, it actually doesn't matter. It's just that thing where you get them off the desk, round a table, everyone eats. If you're sitting remotely, you choose a time. Everyone comes on. You talk about food. I think the difference is most perks by nature are transactional. Food is emotional. If you sit down with someone and you break bread, fundamentally, you will have a different conversation with that person than if you were sitting across a desk in a meeting room.
28:23Brett Harding: And so companies that can think about how to leverage that, you know, everyone has a lunch hour, while some are respected more than others. There is a time of day where people will pause, they'll break, they'll eat food. Thinking about how companies can lean into that moment in the day feels like quite a sensible thing to do. That is one moment where it's the only moment of the day when your employees are kind of deliberately not meant to be thinking about work. So how can you support them and how can you make the most of that moment where they can make friendships and they can connect with people on a different level, all of which is only going to enhance their productivity and their feeling of kind of belonging at work?
29:06Spencer Walker: it's interesting because you could give them lectures about you should take a break you should take a lunch break and then all of a sudden you've created a means for them to feel like they've chosen to take that break you've actually put the break within their their day and i think you have
29:20Brett Harding: to role model it as well right this is something that again i think has been frankly easy to do at delivery because will has always been like the food he a he loves buying food for people randomly. It's a thing, you know, you just will turn up and he'll be like, try this, try this. He's interested in what everyone eats. I'll see him walk in the kitchen even now, like 13 years on. And if he sees someone eating something interesting, doesn't matter who they are, what level they are, he'll go over, he'll have a conversation. They'll talk about food, they'll connect like that. It was so meaningful for that person.
29:55Brett Harding: And it takes all of the stress away of how do I have a conversation with someone more senior than me? It's like, well, it's very easy if you're just discussing what are you eating what do you think of that have you tried this place you know this is just really good like ways for people to have conversations in a non
30:12Spencer Walker: forced way thinking about i guess food also helps us do that thing that we know we're meant to do but we never quite get around to which is pause take a break sort of rest from our work how do
30:25Brett Harding: you think about that i think for some people it absolutely does and i think this is the really cool thing about food it just meets you where you are so if you need a break uh food is absolutely a brilliant enabler to help you to do that or if you need fueling up before a spin class then it also can do that we also have this really interesting dynamic where um which we get through when we speak to employees where some of them um actually use food that they get delivered to them at work as a healthy um option and it's the thing that will give them their one or two uh you know veg a day however however they like to do it um and they will really they'll try and maximize their healthy food through that delivery, which takes a bit of pressure off them when they get home and what they have to cook that night, as they might be getting home late, and then they can just do something simple.
31:28Brett Harding: So it kind of flips on, it flips the narrative that you might assume of thinking about, you know, delivery equals unhealthy, home cooking equals healthy. And we see that coming through in the numbers, right? We've had over the last two years, 89 % growth in salad deliveries to corporate customers in the UK. So like it's definitely happening. And you can also see it on the high street with the emergence of, you know, really great salad brands and healthy food brands like, you know, Atta, Salad Project, PharmaJ, Eat Active, these great brands that have like ballooned over the last kind of five, 10 years, because the demand is there for great healthy food as well.
32:10Brett Harding: I get it. So basically, you can use it to onboard protein before you go to the gym or you can like you can do whatever yeah and i mean look i caught up with the guys from joe and the juice the other day uh they talk about they really talk about this concept of fuel and food that kind of they know exactly what they need and what you know what what protein and uh you know to give them to maximize their workout well it can do that in the same way that it can create a rest in the same way that it can you know frankly give you comfort if you've had a really rubbish day and you just need to pick me up in the afternoon.
32:43Spencer Walker: Let's ask a sort of really broad question to finish both in with your delivery for work hat on and your hat on as a boss as a team leader what do you think employers need to be thinking about going forwards how is the workplace and expectations of employees going to change what is thinking about being ready for the next five years how do you think about that?
33:07Brett Harding: If I was to think about one thing it would be to do the simple thing and to make sure you are talking and asking your teams what they think you know where we've made our best decisions is where we talk to our employees rather than doing a detailed exercise theoretically outside of outside of the kind of employee sphere and then expecting that to resonate um you just may be surprised and i think in this time where so much is changing all the time, it's probably more important than ever to just go in and sense check some of the things that you might have assumed were true or still hold true. And many of them still might.
33:50Brett Harding: But, you know, I come back to that stat on food perks being rated as highly as health and dental benefits. Like I was surprised by that. And I'm in the business of food as a perk. And so it's really worth just going in and talking to your employees and making sure that you hear them.
34:08Spencer Walker: Thank you, Spencer. I've loved it. I wonder if people are interested to find out more, whether it's about your music and your band, or whether it's about Deliveroo for Work or anything, where could people find out more?
34:20Brett Harding: You can find us at work.deliveroo.co.uk, and we are live in any market that Deliveroo is live in. So for any of your international listeners, Bruce, we are there for them too. And where was your music? We were mostly based in the States.
34:36Spencer Walker: Right, okay. No band name on Spotify, good secret. I'm pretty sure you can track it down if you want to. Thank you so much. Spencer, it's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Spencer for joining me for that promoted episode, promoted in association with Deliveroo for Work. If you're interested in any of the stuff we discussed, the Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report, a link to Deliveroo for Work, maybe details on Spencer, or the book I mentioned by Robin Dunbar and Samantha Rocky. You're going to find all of those things in the show notes. I've been Bruce Taisley. Thank you for listening.
35:14Spencer Walker: I'll see you next time.
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This sponsored episode is brought to you by Deliveroo for Work
Spencer Walker is the global director of Deliveroo for Work.
The podcast has returned several times to the idea of food as a cultural trigger, something that catalyses connection and allows cohesion. We explore that idea further this week with Spencer Walker who runs Deliveroo For Work the workplace service provided by the delivery firm.
The Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report
I mention a book by Robin Dunbar and Samantha Rockey, it's this: The Social Brain - Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, Robin Dunbar. They talk about giving curry to bond teams (because the sharing plates require people to pass them around). Hear them talking about it here.
The Deliveroo Feeding Employee Engagement Report
More about food, rituals and culture
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