Solve the Perk Paradox: How to Align your Office Pantry to Your Budget

Creating a thriving workplace experience that is worthy of the commute is no easy feat. It's like any major sporting competition where athletes spend years balancing workouts, practice and recovery just for that one moment when everything falls into place. Workplace teams do the same, crafting every detail from the location, layout, perks, budgets and culture so everything aligns and everyone reaps the rewards.

As 77% of Fortune 100 companies embrace hybrid workplace strategies, workplace teams' rising challenge is sacrificing elements of the office experience in the name of consolidation and, frankly, budget cuts. When workplaces lose the je ne sais quoi that made coming into the office worth it, it's no wonder employees and talent look elsewhere. All that money saved now goes into fueling your never-ending talent acquisition machine that costs upwards of 3-4x these positions' salaries. This leads us to the Perk Paradox: A term coined by Crafty CEO Nathan Rosenstock which encapsulates the tension between companies' desires to enrich the in-office experience to attract and retain talent while also wanting to yield to the economic pressures to curtail expenses.

Employees spend $305-$891/month on office snacks, drinks and meals. If you want them in the office, helping them conquer their largest daily expense isn't just logical, it's a great retention strategy. Instead of offering generic snack solutions that result in more wasted spend and zero to minimal employee impact, leading companies opt for more personalization to match the preferences of each office. Partners like Crafty tailor office food and beverage solutions using the power of technology to maximize existing budgets and deliver an elevated experience.

Create a good foundation with our office pantry budget formula.

The quickest way to create a lackluster program is when your budget doesn't support the experience you want. A realistic and methodical budget is the key to a successful office pantry program, because it allows you to put your money where it has the most impact. This is why Crafty starts with our budgeting formula: A simple method that prioritizes products and service-level to get the end result you are looking for.

You can check out the complete formula inside our new Workplace Trends Report, but a specific step we want to dive into is step two: selecting your budget per employee per day. At Crafty, our clients typically fall between three buckets: $5, $7.50 and $10.

The goal is to help you visualize what the budget looks like in terms of products employees grab daily, but this isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Companies can have the exact same budget, but their experience looks completely different. Gymnasts may do the same tricks, but their routines, music and confidence can deliver completely different experiences.

Three factors play a huge role in how your budget translates into your space:

Product Pricing / Unit: The more affordable your product selection is, the more you can stretch that budget to have more products. The more expensive your products are, the fewer options you will be able to provide.
Flavor Varieties: The more flavor varieties of each product you want, the more you may need to invest in your per person per day budget to sustain property inventory levels.
Employee Daily Consumption: How much your employees take each day will impact your inventory levels and the spend you will need to sustain them. If employees treat your pantry like a grocery store, you may need to pull back pricer products and flavor varieties.

Lucky for you, we're experts in this area with experience across 300+ offices across the globe and all the data you could ever dream of. Our formula is personalized for each location to give us a good starting point, and as you will see, our technology and team come in to make adjustments based on real-time information.

Easily keep inventory at optimal levels with Crafty automation.

Once you're up and running, the fun really begins! Inventory is a major challenge for workplace teams between having too much, too little, or worse, not knowing what you have or need until it's too late. The beauty of Crafty's technology is that it takes the stress of inventory management off your plate so you can focus on the overall experience.

The Crafty Platform's proof of delivery and automated inventory tools ensure you have exactly what you ordered exactly when you need it. Our expert crew is onsite upon delivery, logging your inventory levels so we know the office snacks, drinks and coffee you have in stock. From there, the tech does all the math using minimum thresholds to trigger the products needed for the next order.

The days of not knowing what's coming, what you have or what you need will become a distant memory. The Crafty platform gives you complete visibility into your inventory levels so that your orders are accurate and your team has the fuel they need to be productive.

People and tech working together to solve real pantry problems! Let's hear a round of applause from Jeff Bridges' most iconic character from the movie Stick It.

Make quick adjustments and predictions with powerful reporting tools.

As our partnership advances through the qualifying rounds, we give you complete transparency into your program's success with central reporting inside the Crafty Platform. Yes, we are tracking everything…but in a good way! You'll have a clear picture to guide a cohesive program while being able to zoom in and view some core metrics at each location.

Before Crafty, technology was lacking in the office food service industry. Companies couldn't get visibility into what was happening on the ground from orders, deliveries, restocks and invoices at one location, let alone across the entire company. How can you improve if you don't know how it's going? That wasn't acceptable, so we set out to change that.

The Crafty Platform is your central place to manage your program and make predictions about your food service program:

We often hear from our clients that the idea of getting in contact with someone before Crafty was a pipe dream. A Regional Office Manager for a Leading Asset Management Company said they spent 70% of their time managing their office snack program because their team didn't have the right tools or vendors. Crafty brought that time investment down to 15% because our tech and our people enabled the team to solve issues on the ground quickly.

It takes a village to create a winning workplace strategy, and Crafty clients have an entire crew working toward the program's success:

Company Contact:

Your high-level contact who manages your F&B program as a whole. They are looking at the big picture, ensuring there is cohesive service, your budget is in check and using the collective data to make optimizations company-wide.

If you're a regional, national or global member of the workplace team, you can say goodbye to the stress of chasing down every vendor at every location. Now, you simply have one person to give you the scoop on what is going on, and to be honest, they will probably be sending you check-in emails before you even have to ask!

Location Contact:

At the location level, we assign a member of the Crafty crew for more direct support. These heroes use the Crafty Platform to keep tabs on the day-to-day at that specific location. We're talking about making sure deliveries arrive and are restocked to perfection, all while ensuring the next order looks right, the location's spend aligns with your budget goals, and so much more.

Instead of onsite teams reaching out to their supervisor with questions or issues, they can come to their Crafty location contact. This direct resource allows them to solve problems as quickly and painlessly as possible so they can focus on their other responsibilities.

Crafty takes gold in aligning office pantry experiences with your budget.

Balancing your ideal office experience and your budget can be a challenge. The companies that get it wrong associate price cuts with generic options, resulting in wasted product and money. It can also hurt employee retention.The key to solving this conundrum is operating a highly personalized program based on cold, hard facts and led by experts.

Crafty combines the power of people and technology to make it easy for leading workplaces to scale these personalized programs that align the experience to the budget. Employees can enjoy their favorite office coffee, drinks and snacks, while workplace teams can rest easy knowing they're minimizing waste while delivering a world-class experience.

Learn more about how leading workplaces harness the power of Crafty data to fuel productivity across the globe inside Crafty's Trends Report, "The Future of the Workplace: Usher in a New Era of Workplace Hospitality and Culture." Access your copy today!

Winning with Crafty never tasted so good!