5 Steps To Save On Your Workplace Food Solution

1. Assess Your Office Pantry Needs

Getting a baseline of your current program and the needs of your employees is essential in budgeting effectively. Before you crunch a single number, understand the unique F&B needs of your office: 

• How many people come in?

• What days are they in the office? 

• What is currently being provided? 

• How much of what you are providing is being consumed? 

Then, consider where you're getting your food and beverage items from. At Crafty, our clients come to us with 2 common issues: 

1. Overspending trying to DIY your program with Amazon or Costco that end up not getting consumed. 

2. Overspending with a traditional food service company that can’t tailor an agile program for your budget.  

"Start researching to see what corporate food service companies are available in your area, provide the kind of service you're looking for, and determine the ROI of each," offers Nate Rosenstock, CEO, at Crafty. "The right company will be able to provide you with high-quality service, equipment, snacks, and more within your budget."

Lastly, be bold and ask employees to weigh in by conducting a survey or posing the question at your next big meeting. Knowing what foods your team is genuinely interested in will guarantee that you're making informed decisions that will impact your bottom line.

2. Centralize Your Company's Workplace Food Program

Juggling invoices and receipts across multiple stores or vendors can be a nightmare and makes it easy to overspend in just one location, let alone multiple. Put a cap on your office food service budget based on your learnings from assessing your program. Then start centralizing your budget and spending across your vendors to easily cut out unnecessary expenses. This will help you spend appropriately in real time while being able to predict and plan for future investments in the program. 

Crafty's budgeting feature allows you to centralize and control your entire workplace food budget. From order-level targets to breaking down your spend to the product level, the Crafty Platform provides workplaces with the innovative technology tools to run seamless, agile, and cost-conscious office food programming. 

Working culture can change in the blink of an eye, and ensuring your program can meet your team where they are is critical. It doesn’t matter whether your team is in the office five days a week or follows a hybrid schedule; your headcount and the way employees consume products are always evolving. Add in the unpredictability of economic shifts like tariffs, inflation, or supply chain hiccups, and it becomes essential to have visibility into what’s happening on the ground, and fast. To stay ahead, workplace, procurement, and finance teams must align spending with behavior to avoid over- or underspending on the in-office experience.

Centralizing your budget won't just make workplace teams' jobs more manageable; it will also make it simple for you to prove to your governing bodies (CEOs, investors, execs) that you're making smart decisions and getting the most out of your workplace food program. 

3. Continually Audit Your Corporate Refreshments

According to our recent office pantry spend benchmarks, the average company is spending $21,537 per month on its office pantry program. When you break that down to the office level, that's $8,025 per month. 

"We started Crafty because the reality was that most workplaces have no idea how much they are spending each month," says Nate Rosenstock, CEO and Co-Founder at Crafty. "The office pantry is not the largest investment a workplace makes, but it's not so small that you can afford to have it run unchecked." 

That’s why consistent auditing of your corporate refreshment is a necessity, and to do that, you need 100% visibility into your spend, consumption, and operations. If you don't know what you ordered, what actually got delivered, and how it looks on the shelves, your dollars start to evaporate.

Reducing costs doesn’t mean downgrading the experience. It means being intentional with how you spend your money and adjusting quickly once you see how it performs, or in the pantry's case, gets consumed. Maybe your team is just as happy with Diet Coke instead of a functional alternative like Olipop, but you don't know for sure unless you have the data. 

When you can filter your spend and consumption data by category, subcategory, and product, you gain a clearer picture of what’s actually driving value—and what’s not. Detailed reporting helps you identify trends, spot inefficiencies, and make decisions with confidence.

Pair those insights with employee feedback, and you’ve got a roadmap to reduce waste, satisfy your team, and get more value out of every dollar you spend. When you audit with both data and intention, your pantry stops being a line item and starts acting like a strategic asset.

4. Create Inventory Automations Backed by Data to Reduce Waste

Waste and spoilage equal wasted money. Avoid it by closely monitoring your inventory to continually make adjustments to your selection: 

• Inconsistency in in-office traffic → choose items with a longer shelf life

• An item rarely needs to be restocked → Order less

• An item always needs stocking → Order more

• Have a lot of leftovers after a catering event → try something else next time

But real waste prevention starts before the stockroom—by shifting from guesswork to precision. Too many pantry programs still rely on gut instincts: ordering what feels right, restocking by habit, or responding to complaints instead of patterns. That’s how waste quietly builds up  and budgets get blown.

To stay ahead, leading workplace teams are embedding intelligence into their operations. They’re setting product-level thresholds that trigger restocks automatically, using real-time data to forecast demand, and standardizing across locations to drive consistency.

Modern pantry tools make it possible to:

• Track usage trends by location and product

• Automate restocks based on actual consumption

• Identify bulk upgrade opportunities to reduce packaging and cost-per-serving

• Flag high-waste categories before they spiral

The result? Fewer emergency orders, tighter sustainability practices, and more efficient use of your team’s time.

Because here’s the truth: you can’t control what you don’t verify. When you start using data to guide every inventory decision, you don’t just reduce waste—you build credibility, efficiency, and trust in the program.

5. Maximize Food Service Tax Deductions

Most workplace teams know they should track pantry costs, but fewer realize just how much is at stake if those costs aren’t classified correctly during tax season.

We get it: taxes aren’t the most exciting part of your office food program. But a lack of categorization could mean leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential savings on the table, especially for organizations with multiple locations.

When stocked in shared spaces like break rooms, snacks, coffee, drinks, and supplies often qualify as de minimis fringe benefits and can be 100% tax-deductible. The key to unlocking these deductions? Granular reporting paired with airtight accuracy.

• Granular reporting that breaks down spend by category, subcategory, and product, making it easy for your finance team to identify what qualifies and how it should be filed.

• Order verification and delivery accuracy, so your team isn’t reconciling vague invoices months later without proof that the items were received and used on-site.

If you're working with a vendor that only provides generic receipts or delayed invoices, the process of validating expenses becomes time-consuming, error-prone, and risky. Clean, categorized, and confirmed data means finance can move faster—with confidence.

“The best tax strategy is built on precision," says Cam Lawrence, CFO at Crafty. "When your reporting is detailed and your data is accurate, your finance team can act quickly, file confidently, and uncover savings others miss.”

Start Saving On Your Office Kitchen Programs

When budgets tighten, the smartest workplace teams don’t cut; they optimize. A well-run workplace food solution is a strategic asset that fuels culture, boosts productivity, and delivers measurable ROI. You’re not just stretching your budget, but you’re improving how your workplace operates.

These aren’t just cost-saving tactics. They’re proof points for leadership that your team knows how to move fast, spend smart, and deliver value where it counts.

And with the right partner, you don’t have to choose between experience and efficiency. You can have both...and then some.