No free lunches inside tech companies? Mountain View bans Facebook from serving free food to employees

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When 2,000 Facebook employees move to the company's new campus in Mountain View in Silicon Valley this fall, there is one perk that will be missing-- free food.

In a bizarre move, the city has barred the companies residing in the Village at San Antonio Centre project from providing fully subsidised meals to its employees in their campuses-- a rule that is likely to spread to other cities in the Bay Area including San Francisco in the future.

The project-specific law barring free food at in-house eating places in Mountain View has existed since 2014. However, it didn't garner enough attention as the office being built at San Antonio Centre were no where near completion but now with Facebook making an entrance in the area, things have scaled up.

As per the existing rules that apply to the Village, companies cannot subsidise meals at in-house dining spaces more than 50 per cent, which mean no free coffee waffles or hand-folded sushi for Facebook employees. However, companies can fully subsidise the food for employees if they go to restaurants that are open to public, The Star reported.

Following Mountain View's suit, two legislators in San Francisco-- Supervisors Ahsha Safai and Aaron Peskin-- are expected to announce a legislation banning workplace cafeteria. Their legislation, which bans the companies from having an industrial kitchen in their office building, is being supported by the executive director of Golden Gate Restaurant Association Gwyneth Borden.

The argument that is being put forward by the legislators in San Francisco and Mountain View is that in-house cafeterias are hampering the local business as they refrain employees from moving out of the office building to the nearby dining spaces by luring them with free food. "And you can't compete with free," Borden told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Notably, the ordinance in San Francisco won't be retroactive, which means it won't apply to the companies that already have cafeterias in their campus but to the new constructions in the area.