Sundar Pichai Explains Why Google Keeps Spending on Lavish Office Perks

Providing free food for more than 182,000 people on a daily basis can’t be cheap—especially when the snacks include dried seaweed, kombucha and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. But for Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the Big Tech company’s famous meal perks are well worth it for the productivity they garner.

Google has long been known for its lavish office perks, which include on-site daycare, exercise facilities, nap pods and a range of cafes, restaurants and micro kitchens offering food at no cost. “I think the benefit that comes out of it far dwarfs the costs associated with it,” Pichai said of Google’s meal benefits in an interview with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the private equity giant Carlyle, in an episode of Bloomberg’s “The David Rubenstein Show” earlier this month.

Pichai started working at Google in 2004 as a product manager. “I can recall several times when I was working at Google early on—being in cafes, meeting someone else, talking, getting excited about something,” he told Rubenstein. “It sparks creativity, creates a community.”

Not all of Google’s perks have survived the past few years. In 2023, the company, in an internal memo, announced its plans to streamline its “industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities” by reducing the hours of some of its office cafes and consolidating some of its micro kitchens. Despite such tightening, Google’s incentives remain some of the most generous in Silicon Valley and have led to a domino effect amongst its competitors, according to Pichai. “I think a set of things which Google has done is part of now standard modern workplaces in the Bay Area,” he told Rubenstein.

Office perks help Big Tech companies attract top talent

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Apple (AAPL) provides benefits like meditation, discounts on iPhones and matching donations to eligible charities; Microsoft (MSFT) offers shuttle services, vending machines filled with free snacks and an outdoor amphitheater; and even Amazon (AMZN), lesser known for employee perks, gives out free bananas courtesy of a community fruit stand located near its Arlington, Va., headquarters, which additionally contains a dog park and farmers market.

Meta (META), too, offers lavish food courts for its employees at its larger corporate offices and meal credits for those at smaller locations, the latter of which consists of $20 vouchers for breakfast and $25 vouchers for lunch and dinner. The benefit recently caused a stir earlier this month when Meta laid off nearly a dozen employees for reportedly misusing these meal vouchers to purchase items other than food—including laundry detergent and acne treatment pads—or have meals delivered to their homes instead of the office.

Google, however, seems content with its current perks strategy as a contributing factor in attracting new talent. Nearly 90 percent of people who receive an offer letter at Google accept it, according to Pichai, who described the metric as one he is “proud of.”