The first startup I worked for had the usual free coffee, but the only food they offered was the entire salad drawer of the refrigerator filled with every candy bar imaginable. Refilled twice a day.
Within a month of us moving into that building we'd all put on about 20lbs. Every coffee break was also candy bar time. We demanded they remove them all, for our own safety.
That's what I wish the tech companies had, a way to limit the free snacks. I'd much prefer to have to tap my badge and have the machine tell me that I exceeded 300 kcal in snacks today so no more.
which one was your favorite though?
Candy bar. Because office coffee is mediocre
Fruits are kind of amazing. A tasty apple cut up into slices is more delicious than more or less any concoction Mars & co. can come up with.
Even more "gnarly" stuff like figs, eating them just generates such a positive reaction. And something like mango if you're lucky enough to live in places with it... If you don't have to deal with cutting it up, that's something amazing.
Getting fruit from some farm way far off in the distance to me is a feat of logistics. I always feel a bit stupid about how I reach for convenient stuff because I don't want to take a 5 minute break to do a bit of prep and cleanup.
In principle, I agree. However, I haven't had a tasty apple in ages - they're all way too sweet for my taste.
I've been thinking about how modern fruit optimize for (among numerous other things) sweetness, and whether modern fruit are actually healthy in terms of glycemic index / glycemic load / etc.
My SO is basically like "fruits _are_ filled with sugar" and they're not wrong. It feels pretty hard to make strong qualitative judgements on this stuff. Feels better than a snickers bar, surely?
The only real thing that feels kind of easy to say is that any sweet drink is probably worse for you than just drinking water. Easiest diet in the world is to just never buy soft drinks, and the extra trick is to also not replace it with orange or apple juice.
While fruits are packed with sugar, eating fruit also comes with fiber. This extra digestion slows the intake of sugar into the bloodstream, and getting fat/unhealthy from sugar comes from to much of it going through the liver. Because you may have too much sugar at a time, the liver needs help from the pancreas, which secretes insulin to store the sugar, which makes you fat.
Do you know if there's a good rule of thumb for how different that ratio might be? I do like having some quantitative ballpark to go along with the qualitative texture
It seems like fruit are preferable due to fiber, sugar content equal.
I know I read several years ago that some zoos were cutting back on the amount of fruit they feed their animals because modern cultvars are too sweet.
when my parents sold my (passed away) grandfather's farm, they took a sapling of the 150 year old apple tree. Those apples are so delicious.
They're tiny and acidic, but the flavors are so complex compared to a supermarket apple that's giant and sweet.
Would have to be a branch that was spliced, and wouldn't be 150 years old, apple trees don't live that long.
Either way, the worst office snack IMHO is the apple, the person sitting next to me, taking a big bite, munching with their mouth open.
A great way to boost the logistics score of fruits like mango is to buy dried. To remain true to the scientific method I didn't include dried mango because it's not provided at the office. I do frequently bring it in.
you should try a mangosteen or cherimoya. discovering the broader fruitiverse was pretty eye opening.
Mangosteen are freaking amazing. I got addicted to them when I was living in Thailand. Impossible to get in my city here in the US East coast.
Lowtax tried to enlighten us in 2006, but we weren't ready to listen :( https://i.imgur.com/Fox9wMc.jpeg
You obviously didn't make it down to "lemon"
He straight-up ate someone else's salad?
"But the distribution is bimodal here because the massive upside is countered by a massive downside: You need to evade detection. Will you hide in the bathroom? Pretend you ordered the same thing? Eat it at your desk? Either way, you need to be prepared."
Pro health tip: Don't eat where you perform waste removal functions.
One of the best pieces of lore at my employer came courtesy of our "free food" slack channel. It was customary, after catered meetings, to post the location of any leftovers so the vultures could come by and enjoy a free second lunch.
Until.
Until the "cool intern" noticed food outside a conference room shortly after noon and posted it on the free food channel. Hordes of people came by to avail themselves of the food, leaving a horrified meeting organizer to fight them off while trying to post a rebuttal on slack saying that the food was NOT, in fact, available for the taking, the attendees hadn't had a lunch break yet, pleading with people to stop taking their food, etc.
The photo made me think of a common thing at my workplace -- a conference/customer visit had too much catering, and the leftovers were deposited in the break room. They usually don't stay very long.
I ate my co workers sandwich when I was 18 at my first job at a start-up. Sometimes you gotta fuck up to learn - I never did that again.
If you eat your co-worker's sandwich twice, however... may satan take you
Was it the moist maker?
> He straight-up ate someone else's salad?
... no, it's clearly a joke.
Normalize treating someone who steals someone else’s food in the workplace the same way you would treat someone who steals someone else’s medication or telephone.
Grazing on leftover Forkable lunches is one of the great pleasures of going into the office now. I eat my regular lunch at noon. At three or four, I do a lap to see if there are any unclaimed leftovers from folks who didn't make it in. I might eat one right there, or hide it in the fridge to take home later. It's like a VC-funded loot box - will I get a sandwich? Some curry? Dim sum? The possibilities are endless.
one time Doordash sent us someone else's order on accident. And THEN sent us our actual order. It was glorious.
When their order was actually better than yours. I know the feel. You know it's wrong, but it was preordained.
At one stage pre-pandemic, someone with tongue firmly in cheek, produced a wiki page with details of all the meals you could make with the office kitchen snacks and equipment. I think that eventually got removed, because the snacks changed and it was no longer accurate. No one has had that dedication since.
I do recall doing the same - partially for myself to remember all the meal hacks coworkers gave me! Putting those packaged hardboiled eggs and seaweed snacks into shin ramen is still memorable to this day.
I hope they got promoted
> Everybody likes grapes.
False.
I've heard that some med students use grapes to practice stitches, and that is how I feel about grapes.
Grapes are obviously not meant to be eaten by humans, and must serve some other, probably squeamishness-inducing, purpose.
They did Content Marketing on a grape
Warm grapes, sure.
FROZEN grapes? Ambrosia from the gods.
some of us cant consume too much in the way of fruit.. FODMAP issues really limit your snacking and healthy snacking even more :-(
I once bit into a lemon like that. It ate away some enamel on my teeth and they were sensitive for a few weeks. 0/5
When I lived near a pick-your-own apple farm I often ate 10+ apples a day. After about 5-6 my teeth would get sensitive. Couldn't stop eating them, though- wholly unlike a store apple: crisp, sweet, sour.
You can’t compare the two
If you want something even more detailed than Cabel Sasser’s annual sanck and cereal showcase is something else
I'd also recommend the Mike and Tom Eat Snacks podcast. It's a master class in being entertaining while filling time.
this is who I look up to
That was a great use of my time - thanks for the entertainment
I've had no problem completing the "ate every snack in our kitchen" part. Reviewing them, though, is a level of dedication I don't have.
It's a labor of love
This may not be the best for lead gen, but it's great for recruiting!
hahahahaha great article and definitely a lead generator
totally shocked how grapes managed to get a 5/5 on logistics though, theyre a nightmare
seedless ones aren't
Best / funniest lead-gen blog post I've read in ages. Bravo!
Really needs a scatter plot or something. A ranking.
Was expecting something like an ELO rating.
The Cliff's Builders Bar (chocolate mint edition) is actually pretty good. This person has no taste.
They’re terrible. Those things are for people who dont like food and just need to consume for energy.
Nope, mint and chocolate are great individually but intended to remain separate. Protein bars in and of themselves are questionable, but combined with an unholy combination of foods this product is bad.
Mint and chocolate is a classic combination. You have weird taste buds.
I'll agree mint chocolate protein bars are fit to be spewed out of the mouth of God, but you're attacking Andes mints here. An Andes mint is a tiny bit of perfection.
That was a great read.
Funny article. Interesting product too.
Disappointed that microwaved yesterdays fish is not reviewed.
Social score: "No don't so it just go ahead and steal my lunch please!"
Next time I do this I'll add "hardboiled egg from a ziploc bag"
Is Series A is the "office snacks" round?
I assume you hire a catering service to stock the snacks and fridges, and that they work out deals with some vendor?
A lot of those catering services get close to free Snacks to fill Tech offices.
Their bet is that you will like them and get used to them and buy them once you get used to them (And I sadly must say that worked on me).
Why buy when you can stea- uhh "take one for the road"?
