When I worked at a summer camp with a reputation for good food, one of the meals they would make involved two baguettes per table, still warm from the oven, and it was super popular.
Cafeterias seem like they would be a good candidate for this with a lot of people and predictable demand, though they’re often trying to feed people as cheaply as possible, and with a captive audience they don’t have much incentive to improve. Fancy tech office cafeterias seem like they could do this if they wanted to?
In my experience, cafeterias are more likely trying to be inoffensive to everybody than to be trying to reduce costs, and in any case their costs per person are lower than the per-person costs of preparing comparable food at most, if not all, qualities of food.
The line between cafeteria and buffet restaurant isn’t perfectly defined, and I think that there are already businesses that operate on a cash-per-eater basis that are substantially high-end cafeterias. Shifting to a pay-per-month basis for them seems plausible, but I’m not sure if they get the price per day down to commercially viable levels without sacrificing quality.
I think a tech office cafeteria is going to have a disadvantage in that it is going to provide mostly one real meal per day while also being required to provide snacks and beverages throughout the day, but it might have sufficient funding to be an interesting example.
To test the concept properly I’d want to have a cafeteria located near (within a short walk during lunch break) some (tech?) office buildings that offered monthly memberships as well as daily sales. A company-owned cafeteria for employee use is going to have illegible, although likely higher, value/cost.
When I worked at a summer camp with a reputation for good food, one of the meals they would make involved two baguettes per table, still warm from the oven, and it was super popular.
Cafeterias seem like they would be a good candidate for this with a lot of people and predictable demand, though they’re often trying to feed people as cheaply as possible, and with a captive audience they don’t have much incentive to improve. Fancy tech office cafeterias seem like they could do this if they wanted to?
In my experience, cafeterias are more likely trying to be inoffensive to everybody than to be trying to reduce costs, and in any case their costs per person are lower than the per-person costs of preparing comparable food at most, if not all, qualities of food.
The line between cafeteria and buffet restaurant isn’t perfectly defined, and I think that there are already businesses that operate on a cash-per-eater basis that are substantially high-end cafeterias. Shifting to a pay-per-month basis for them seems plausible, but I’m not sure if they get the price per day down to commercially viable levels without sacrificing quality.
I think a tech office cafeteria is going to have a disadvantage in that it is going to provide mostly one real meal per day while also being required to provide snacks and beverages throughout the day, but it might have sufficient funding to be an interesting example.
To test the concept properly I’d want to have a cafeteria located near (within a short walk during lunch break) some (tech?) office buildings that offered monthly memberships as well as daily sales. A company-owned cafeteria for employee use is going to have illegible, although likely higher, value/cost.