As the air turns crisp and sweaters emerge from hibernation, your employees are more than ready to embrace the cozy vibes in your office.
This doesn't mean you need to completely overhaul every single product in your office pantry to align with the seasons. In fact, we recommend against that. Routine is an essential part of your team and company's success, and food is a massive part of building that routine:
- Employee: Research shows that taking the guesswork out of meal planning can help employees lock in healthier habits. Those healthy habits lead to employees who are less stressed, more productive and produce a better quality of work.
- Company: Consistency within your pantry helps keep your budget on track. The more you switch up your pantry, the easier it is to go off course.
At the same time, you don't want a stagnant pantry. You want some flexibility to keep things fresh while maintaining desired consistency. Instead, leave room to mix things up within the boundaries of your team's unique routines. The key to doing so: adding flavor.
"Switching up flavor is a simple way to align your pantry to the season while maintaining your employee experience and budget," says Jeff Nash, Crafty's Senior Director of Merchandising. Playing with flavor ensures your product spend remains consistent while providing fresh new options within your pantry. Here are a few examples:
- Office Coffee Station: You may always have the same coffee beans, but you can easily swap flavors of syrups or creamers to match the season.
- Office Snack Bars: You may always have the same brand of bars, such as Larabar or RXBAR, but swap more indulgent flavors in the fall/winter and brighter flavors in the summer/spring.
We tapped the Crafty Merchandising Team to give us the tea and tell us what flavors they recommend most coming into fall.
Chocolate is probably our favorite way to indulge this season, and we're not alone. Nearly two-thirds of global consumers purchased some sort of chocolate in the last year, with 55% saying chocolate made them happy and 36% saying they did it to treat themselves.
Now that we've unpacked the best flavors for the fall, you're probably looking for some actual products to stock the shelves with. Don't worry, we've got you covered.
We went to our product extraordinaire Vaibhav Shastry to get the list of all lists to share with you:
- Pipcorn Cinnamon Twists
- Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal Cup
- Rishi Tea Turmeric Ginger
- Zee Zees Berry Apple Crisp Nutrition Bar
- LaCroix Peach-Pear
- KIND Dark Chocolate Mocha Almond