A client came to Sifted for lunch in one office. Then they needed us in another city. And another. Along the way, one of those offices grew into a space with its own kitchen, so the program there evolved from carry-in catering to an onsite café.
Today, we support the same company with different food programs in different places. The menus are local. The kitchens are local. The service model fits each office. But the client has one partner responsible for making all of it work.
This is increasingly what workplace food looks like for growing companies. The goal isn’t to make every office identical. It’s to build a program that can flex by location without becoming fragmented as the company grows.
That experience has shaped how we’ve built Sifted.
“Consistency doesn’t mean making every office the same. It means giving every team a great experience while giving workplace leaders one program they can actually manage.”— Jess Legge, Co-founder & CEO, Sifted
We’ve grown by following our clients
Sifted has opened kitchens and built local teams in new markets because our clients needed us there.
Over time, we’ve gotten very good at it.
There’s a practical reason. Corporate food programs are all we do. Our kitchens aren’t supporting restaurant service at night or weddings on the weekend. Our operating model was built around feeding people at work, repeatedly, five days a week if needed.
Opening a new market requires finding the right production space, hiring and training a local team, developing supplier relationships, understanding delivery routes, building menus and getting a lot of operational details right before anyone serves lunch.
After doing this across markets, you learn where launches tend to go sideways. You also learn what needs to happen early so they don’t.
That experience is useful to a client expanding into a city where Sifted doesn’t yet operate. They aren’t asking an established local caterer to stretch into a new kind of business. They’re asking us to repeat something we already know how to build.
Sometimes growth happens inside the same office
We’ve also seen clients outgrow the way they originally served food.
Carry-in catering can be a great model for a growing office. Then the company moves, builds a kitchen or reaches a headcount where an onsite café starts to make more sense.
That transition can be surprisingly disruptive if it means finding an entirely new operator.
We designed Sifted to support both models. We can begin with a recurring carry-in program and, when the workplace warrants it, operate an onsite kitchen with chefs producing food in the building.
By that point, we already know a lot: what employees eat, how the workplace operates, what the client cares about and what has made the program successful. That knowledge carries forward.
Multiple offices shouldn’t mean multiple food programs
There’s also a management problem that appears as companies expand.
A workplace leader may be responsible for lunch in several offices, each with different headcounts, attendance patterns and local preferences. The answer isn’t necessarily to make every menu identical. San Francisco can feel like San Francisco. Chicago can feel like Chicago.
But the person responsible for those programs should not have to manage each location as an entirely separate universe.
The operating standards can be consistent. So can reporting, food safety, feedback, invoicing and accountability.
This is an area we’re investing in heavily with Sifted Control. Workplace teams can see what’s happening across locations and understand their food program at both the individual-office and portfolio level.
[MULTI-SITE DASHBOARD / SIFTED CONTROL VISUAL]
Once our expanded multi-site dashboards are complete, clients will be able to see program performance across their locations in one view: participation, spending, menu performance, feedback and other measures that help them understand what’s working and where something needs attention.
The first lunch tells you a lot
Opening day gets plenty of attention internally at Sifted. It should get very little attention from the client.
By then, the important work has already happened.
That’s one of the advantages of specialization. We’ve opened enough workplace food programs to know that a successful launch is mostly the result of decisions made weeks earlier.
And once the program is running, we get to focus on the part employees notice: whether the food is good, whether there’s enough of it, whether there’s something they want to eat and whether tomorrow’s menu is worth coming back for.
For companies choosing a workplace food partner, that makes scalability worth considering earlier than you might think.
You may only need lunch in one office today. But if you’re growing, it’s worth understanding whether the partner you choose can still make sense when the workplace looks different a few years from now.
A food program built for what comes next
Sifted runs recurring workplace food programs across multiple markets and service models, from fully managed carry-in catering to onsite kitchens.
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