Silicon Valley companies may have to give up providing ubiquitous free snack selections when offices reopen

• As offices gear up to reopen during the coronavirus pandemic, employers are exploring how to implement distancing measures in the workplace.
• That includes minimizing contact among workers, including in snack rooms and community kitchens.
• Workers may not have access to ample free snacks, one of many job perks instituted in Silicon Valley, for the foreseeable future.
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Thousands of white-color employees have adapted to working from home due to the coronavirus disease, but many may be able to return to the workplace in the near future.

But to do so, their employers are tasked with safeguarding the workplace against the infectious disease. That includes minimizing human contact among workers throughout the office, including in snack rooms and community kitchens.

Robust snack assortments have long been a Silicon Valley mainstay. Tech companies have been using the workplace and its variety of perks and amenities to recruit the best and brightest talent for years. Cereal containers full of snacks, catered lunches, and on-site massages are typically a given upon new employment.

And some tech workers are already feeling the absence of those perks to which they've become accustomed. To save costs, Google has told its employees that they're not allowed to expense things like meals when working from home, as Business Insider's Hugh Langley reported.

But such vast selection of munchies may not have a place in the office in the foreseeable future. Primo Orpilla, cofounder and principal of Studio O+A, told Business Insider that companies in the region are uncertain about how to minimize contact in community kitchens. As a result, returning workers may not have the kind of selection they had in the past.

"All my clients are not opening up their micro kitchens or break areas yet because they're not quite sure how to deal with the tension of all the foods and all the different grab-and-go stuff that is very Bay Area," Orpilla said.

Many companies might opt for prepackaged snacks and food instead.

It's one of the many considerations that employers are having to factor into eventually welcoming returning workers to the office.

Design firms in the region are coaching companies through the reentry process and say safety measures, like one-way hallways and sneeze guards, will need to be implemented. Workstations will need to be staggered, and perhaps employees will only come into the office for group work, with individual, heads-down tasks delegated to the home office.

Firms also say that companies need to factor in a potential second wave of the disease in the fall, which could mean shutting offices down again if they do reopen.

Greg Mottola, a principal at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, told Business Insider that because of that, a lot of tech clients aren't exactly jumping at the opportunity to reopen, especially since remote work was already deeply ingrained in the tech industry. Productivity has long been valued over mere office attendance.

"Everything's in the cloud for them," Orpilla said of tech workers. It's not as much of a priority for them to be in the office as it is for workers in other industries, such as the more traditional finance sector.