How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables
By: Jane Black
Tags: Google, Vegetables, Engineering, Health, Industry

How Google Got Its Employees to Eat Their Vegetables

The tech giant is engineering a way to encourage its employees to eat healthier — and it might just help the rest of the country

Tina Williams eats greens for breakfast every day. She didn’t always. There was a time when the only vegetables she regularly ate were canned corn or potatoes. But Williams works at Google in New York City, where the food is free and her favorite kale-quinoa-avocado salad is available starting at 8 a.m. each workday.

Growing up, Williams would never have believed that she would one day eat salad for breakfast. Her middle-class family lived outside of Boston, and she remembers feeling sorry for the kid she knew whose mom always bought whole-wheat bread. But over nine years at Google, where she eats breakfast and lunch five days a week, she has learned to like bok choy, a vegetable she previously wouldn’t have recognized in the supermarket, and Brussels sprouts, of which she says, “It turns out I really like when they are well-prepared.”

Williams, who is 35, tall, and fit, now feels good about how she eats. But she knows that her healthier diet depends in large part on Google. When she took maternity leave a few years ago, she didn’t have time to prep greens every morning — never mind that despite multiple attempts, her version of the kale-quinoa salad never turns out quite right. “That’s what I fear if I lose my job,” Williams told me. “The food implications! Which is nuts.”

Google’s free food is a well-known perk, both in and beyond Silicon Valley. The company’s first chef, Charlie Ayers, won his job in 1999 by cooking a meal for Google’s then 40-some employees that included, among other dishes, Sri Lankan chicken curry with roasted pumpkin. It wasn’t long before every ambitious Silicon Valley company was compelled to compete with the legend of Google’s food. A 2014 headline from nerd-food site Serious Eats summed up its reputation: “Lunch at Google HQ Is as Insanely Awesome as You Thought.”

For some time now, Google has been quietly adding a (virtuous) new wrinkle to its food program: It’s no longer enough just to keep its employees happy; it’s trying to make them healthy, too. Over the past five years, the company has taken a typically Google-ish approach to the food it serves — methodical, iterative — to create the largest and most ambitious real-world test of how to nudge people to make healthier choices at mealtime. The campaign isn’t changing just the food itself, but how it’s presented. Google’s tactics include limiting portion sizes for meat and desserts and redesigning its premises to lead its “users” to choose water and fruit over soda and M&M’s. The goal, says Michiel Bakker, Google’s director of global workplace programs, is to make the healthy choice the easy choice and, as in the case of Tina Williams, the preferred one.

The company’s grand experiment matters because getting Americans to eat healthfully has long flummoxed scientists, public health advocates, corporations, and schools, all of which are desperately seeking ways to improve the American diet.

The results, though limited, are impressive. In the kitchens of Google’s New York offices alone, which feed more than 10,000 people daily, the company serves 2,300 breakfast salads every day, up from zero two years ago. Seafood consumption jumped 85% between 2017 and 2018, from 13 to 24 pounds per person, even though the company focuses on more sustainable but less popular species such as trout, octopus, fluke, and shellfish. While soda consumption has remained flat at an average of 20 cans per person per year, water consumption has jumped sharply. In 2018, New York Googlers drank nearly five times more bottled water than bottled sugary drinks — and that doesn’t include the water drunk in cups and free reusable water bottles that Google provides to cut back on its use of plastic.

Good for Google, critics may scoff, but can it be replicated? After all, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is valued at nearly $1 trillion, and Google has an unusually educated, motivated, and sophisticated workforce. But the company’s grand experiment matters because getting Americans to eat healthfully has long flummoxed scientists, public health advocates, corporations, and schools, all of which are desperately seeking ways to improve the American diet. Obesity affects almost one in five children and one in three adults in the United States, putting them at risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. And no effort to reverse it has worked.

The traditional public health campaigns, which specialize in telling people what they should do, routinely fail to alter behavior. Since the early 1990s, agencies including the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been pushing “five a day” initiatives to encourage Americans to get five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, but today, only 13% of Americans eat the recommended servings of fruit, and just 9% eat enough vegetables. The feckless corporate wellness industry — which offers health and fitness programs and incentives to corporate employees — has grown into an $8 billion behemoth without making much difference in the health of American workers or reducing corporate health care costs. And the dieting industry? The most successful results it generates are its $66 billion in annual revenue.

Google’s strategy, in contrast, is simple, subtle, and replicable. With the exception of the panoramic city views, the Google cafés I visited at the company’s New York offices looked a lot like the coffee bars, fast-casual burrito shops, made-to-order salad bars, and buffets you’ll find anywhere else. But the small changes make big differences. The plates on the buffet line are only eight to 10 inches wide, versus a standard 12 inches, which effectively limits serving sizes. Vegetables always come first on the line, so by the time you get to the meat or the snickerdoodles and chocolate tarts, there’s not much space on your plate. “Spa water,” bobbing with strawberries or cucumbers or lemons, is everywhere — and deliberately more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. A burrito at Google weighed in at about 10 ounces — 60% smaller than the whopping one-pound nine-ounce log filled with similar ingredients that I picked up at a Chipotle near my home in Washington, D.C.

In other words, it’s a vision of what sensible eating could look like. Through small, intentional choices, Google has conjured a world for its employees where there are no 20-ounce Caramel Frappuccinos, no Triple Whoppers, and no “endless” shrimp, pasta, and breadsticks. “What Google is attempting here is culture change,” says David Katz, MD, MPH, founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and president of the True Health Initiative. “And that’s the level we have to reach to transform behaviors and health for a lifetime.”