How Airbnb Built a Unique Food Program with McKenzie Phelan, Airbnb

As a tech company focused on 'hospitality' and 'belonging', I wasn't surprised to find out that Airbnb offers a prime food program for its employees that many tech companies globally use as a reference for their own food program.

This podcast clocks in at around 37 minutes. You can also listen to it on iTunes, stream on Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. So head out for a walk and let McKenzie and I keep you company. Prefer to read the transcripts? Scroll down.

But if food is just a perk—see free lunch and snacks—that more and more organizations are offering, what’s so unique about it that so many tech companies worldwide get inspired by it? Why is there a strategy behind a food program? And how to feed a growing population of employees without breaking the bank?

As the Global Food Strategy Manager, McKenzie Phelan is in charge of the food strategy that focuses on employee experience, oversees how the food program is executed in Airbnb's offices globally and makes sure that the program serves up the company’s core values around the globe. 

McKenzie Phelan: Global Food Strategy Manager at Airbnb

McKenzie joins me in this very first episode of The Nourishing Workplace, where we discussed everything from what it means to create a food program that does much more than “feeding employees” to how to prevent food waste and educate your people about the challenges and threats of the current food system.

Key Takeaways

Short on time? Here are four quick takeaways:

The global food strategy team is a two-person team: McKenzie and her colleague Meghan. Their job is to make sure that the food experience at Airbnb has both continuity and some parity between offices. They focus on three main aspects: 1. Maintaining the ethos of the food program so that food isn’t seen as a utility but as a conduit for culture in the workplace. 2. Refining their sourcing ethos to procure the best food that's been raised and distributed most ethically. 3. Developing waste strategies and engaging Airbnb employees around the topic of food.

At the genesis of the Airbnb food program, the food team was fully a part of the company. As the company grew, the food team grew in tandem and became necessary to think about how to reduce the resources for it. That's why the food team was outsourced to Bon Appétit Management.

Airbnb's core business is all about hospitality and belonging. Therefore, the food philosophy is embedded in that of the brand. They look strategically for moments where there can be resonance between the Airbnb product and the products of the food team, which is the food. They do so by (re)designing menus and food spaces.

McKenzie argues that more companies should take climate consciousness more seriously and integrate that into their own success metrics. She wants to see how Airbnb plans to offset what they promote. Some ways the food team does that is by developing food waste strategies and educating their employees. 

Shownotes

Here is a list of articles and resources mentioned in this episode plus further resources:

Airbnb: A host of reasons – Airbnb welcomes the hospitality industry in-house (Life & Thyme)

Recipes from the Airbnb Kitchens: a selection of the most requested recipes in each hub and office

The Beginner's Guide to Food Programs (WE Factory)

19 Reasons to Eat Well at Work (WE Factory)

Cover of Recipes from the Airbnb Kitchens Connect with McKenzie

Connect with McKenzie on LinkedIn and on Instagram

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Episode's Transcripts

 Note: The Nourishing Workplace is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the transcriptions.

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How McKenzie became the Global Food Strategy Manager at Airbnb

I became convinced that I wanted to work in food at a really young age. I moved to France when I was 17 and lived with a host family for a year, who was named the most ecological family in all of France by Le Monde. Their attitude towards food was strikingly different than what I had been 'indoctrinated with' as a young American.

When I moved back to the USA, I realized food and agriculture were important and interesting to me. I had my first job as a cheesemonger. Then, I worked as a pastry chef in college. After college, I spent some time doing grant research on biodynamic wine, also in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. After that, I worked in wine, doing retail, and loved it. Being involved in all of the rich traditions of those different culinary domains like cheese, pastry, and wine stimulated a different set of skills.

Since I have a degree in foreign languages, I was able to join Airbnb, where I led the foreign language team briefly. It was brief only because when I learned that there was a food team at Airbnb, I knew I wanted to be on that.

That shows you how unfamiliar with the tech world I was. I had no idea that companies were trying to be competitive by offering these amazing in-house programs. Yet my skills in the food industry did not give me much opportunity to work on the food team since I didn't have experience in the back or front of house. Similarly, I didn't come from the restaurant world: I hadn't worked in service in that capacity.

The former global head of food said: "Listen, I don't think we'll ever need a project manager or anything like that." That shows that we grew fast. At the time, we had three large hubs. By the end of next year, we anticipated having tripled that. Eventually, a project manager type role manifested, and I was able to take that on.

What did you do as the manager of the food team?

Originally, I focused mostly on communication and events strategy. Over the years and through certain succession, I was able to take on our global strategy, along with my colleague Meghan.

The global food strategy team's role at Airbnb from strategy to day-to-day operations You mentioned that many people in the food team had front and back house roles. However, in the beginning, your job involved different tasks related to communication and strategy. What's the global food strategy team? And what are your tasks today as the global food strategy manager?

The global food strategy team is a two-person team: me and one other person. The rest of the food operations team is spread out across the globe and focused on day-to-day operations. They make sure that the menus are written and go out on time. They take feedback from employees and integrate that into the respective programs.

I make sure that the food experience at Airbnb has both continuity and, to the best degree possible, some parity between offices. The ethos of our program needs to be maintained, so that food as a conduit for culture in the workplace is always championed. That food isn't seen as a utility. The other component that we try to refine across the various offices is our sourcing ethos. We want to procure the best food that's been raised and distributed most ethically. We also think about our waste strategies and the way that we engage our employees around the topic of food.

Do you apply the same strategy to all the different offices? Or do you take each of them individually?

They require different strategies each time when cooperating with regional teams or designing things with particular sites in mind.

That's interesting. Can you give us an example?

Absolutely. I'll use waste as an example. My team and I have been trying to spend 2018 to benchmark the sustainability of our program. 

Since San Francisco is our largest program, a lot of what we want to influence is around sourcing. We spend much time thinking about the provenance of certain foods since we want the food to be about as close to our office as possible. We're able to source within 150 miles about 80% of our food. And yet we're still trying to improve that metric. Here we go: we have that situation in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, I also oversee Beijing, where we don't yet have recycling in the office. It's interesting because we want to try to establish programmatic parity. Still, when it comes to evaluating the footprint of the two operations, we are starting at drastically different places that reflect both the advancement of the food and the sustainability discourse in the respective regions. That's an exciting challenge. I love learning about those differences. However, that also means that there's no one size fits all strategy.

What are some of the strategies or tricks to keep the program consistent across all the Airbnb offices and hubs?

There are lots of things that we can work towards to make the programs more consistent. Something we believe in across all of our programs is that bulk food is better. That means eliminating packaging. The food systems in San Francisco and in Beijing have different tolerances for this sort of thing. Although it may be a bit harder to find suppliers, it is possible in Beijing to source all of our snacks in bulk and move away from individually packaged beverages. We do that by having a food team member who is passionate about it and does more of those operations in house. To make bulk teas rather than sourcing individually packaged ones, it doesn't require a large production kitchen.

That's an area where we are finding parity. It requires more attention from the food program side, but that doesn't require an entire paradigm shift of the local food system.

What have you found to be a challenge?

A challenge is the sourcing of animal proteins. In San Francisco, we have a lot of local fish and some really wonderfully raised beef. However, in China, the beef that we source has to come from Australia because of the standards that have to be met. We're comparing apples to oranges when we are looking at the radius and the proximity of our sourcing. Since some of that is beyond the control of Airbnb, we start with what we can influence in-house.

What about the engagement of employees? Do you find any challenge with that across different offices and hubs?

We actually find that we're quite successful between offices. An example would be honoring Earth Day. For Earth Day (note: Earth Day takes place every year on April 22nd), we send out information to each of our offices about what the food team does, what we believe in, and prompt them to have an associated experiential moment around that. Each of our offices had a vegetarian menu that day or rather a plant-based menu. 

The other major inhibitor is whether you have a food team and production onsite or offsite. A challenge of trying to create parity is whether you have a team of one versus a team of 200 to execute on these programs.

The evolution of the Airbnb Food Program When we connected the first time, I mentioned an article from the Life & Thyme Magazine, which described the Airbnb food program as it was around 2015 and before. Can you talk about how the Airbnbs food program has started and changed over the years? It would also be helpful if you could provide an overview of how it is today.

We have seven major hubs. To qualify as a hub, an office needs to have, at this point in time, 400 employees or more. We have those in North America, Beijing, Singapore, and Dublin. Those are all resourced maximally. The budget for those offices allows for multiple meals five days a week. There are a few ways that people use this budget. 

In Singapore, Beijing, and Seattle, we have one individual who oversees the food program, and they use local caterers. Our job is to influence how they partner with caterers and try to find caterers who have a similar philosophy towards food. And I'd say that those are working successfully. That's a model that has gone uninterrupted. In Dublin and Montreal, the food team is fully a part of Airbnb, much like a software engineer there. Dishwashers are employees, they have equity in the company and enjoy the same benefits that their peers do. 

At the genesis of the Airbnb food program, that was the case for all of our major offices, including San Francisco, which presently has over 4,000 employees and Portland, which is in the state just North of California, and they have about 400, drastically smaller. 

For a long time, that was a really functional model that sets Airbnb apart from some of our peers, other Silicon Valley titans such as Uber, Facebook, and Google. I refer to them as peers simply because they believe in feeding their employees three meals a day and that food is both seen as a cultural engagement tool.

Without being cynical, it's also a retention and recruiting tool. Unlike our peers at these other companies, Airbnb employees were full time. They were on Airbnb payroll, and it was a really fabulous equalizer. It didn't create a sense of divide between those who perform service and those who are serviced. 

However, with that team trying to scale with the rest of the company, and I'll use San Francisco specifically as we went from 400 employees to 800, and presently to 4,000, the food team grew in tandem to be able to serve this growing population. 

After some time, you realize the food team has become about 200 people between the front of the house, the dish team, back of house management. That's a really large team. It became so large that it caught the eye of our leadership at Airbnb because that outpaces even the marketing efforts (the marketing team, the legal team).

That means that there are lots of strains on internal resources. How do you continue to recruit for something like that? How do you hire recruiters who are skilled at recruiting from the food industry when this is actually a tech company, and most recruiters have a technical background? That's the same with HR. There are kitchen behaviors and disputes that are quite unfamiliar to an HR person who doesn't have that background. 

Over time as the team grew and grew, it became a resource strain as well as something that those of us who were trying to manage the growth couldn't handle. I started realizing that we were entering territory that we'd never been in before, and so the decision was made. Frankly, I can share that it was made well above anyone who oversaw the food team to outsource the team to Bon Appétit, which is a subsidiary of Campus, which I think you probably are familiar with––they operate worldwide. 

The idea was we, Airbnb at large, is not a food service expert company. Frankly, we don't have the resources to invest in becoming a 21st-century food service company. It felt sensible to partner with someone who had already taken many teams through the same growth process that we were experiencing.

What was your sentiment around these partnerships for the food program?

I think that the premise of that is quite sound, and as a business decision, it holds up. However, I can speak candidly that something is lost. Obviously, when you outsource your program to a third party that operates all over the world, there will be standardization.

Part of how they managed to do so is through standardizing lots of things: standardizing menu, standardizing hiring processes, standardizing experiential moments in the office. Popups are surprise and delight moments. So when these things are standardized as well as the sourcing and procurement philosophy, you feel as if you have lost something unique in favor of something easy to manage that will scale.

I have an emotional reaction to the loss of being a team that's a part of the company, which gets to make independent decisions for whom there is no client and vendor relationship that you need to tiptoe around.

How the food program embeds the core business of Airbnb You talked about food as a driver of culture. How do you make a food program mirror and support the core business?

We understand that the core business really is all about hospitality and belonging. And as a food team, I think it feels so natural that our philosophy is very embedded in that of the brand. But we look strategically for moments where there can be certain resonance between the product and our products, the food. 

Each menu that we serve is inspired by an Airbnb listing. In that sense, the cuisine feels very global and yet day–by–day, highly localized. You will get Ethiopian food on a Tuesday, and when you walk up to the line, you can see the listing that inspired this menu. Occasionally, we can work with the hosts directly and learn about the food that they love or if they prepare food for their guests, what that is, and we'll recreate it. That's one way that we want to bring the Airbnb experience into our kitchens.

 “We understand that the core business really is all about hospitality and belonging and as a food team, I think it feels so natural that our philosophy is very embedded in that of the brand but we look strategically for moments where there can be certain resonance between the product and our products the food.”

Another way is that when we design our food spaces, mostly our smaller tea points or break rooms, we design those after kitchens that exist on Airbnb. For example, we have a kitchen inspired by one from Mumbai, down to the very little chotskies that they have on their shelves. We will try to find something that looks as close to that as possible and model our spaces exactly after homes on the platform. 

Another thing we do bear out of Airbnb experiences, an initiative that began in 2016. If you go to the Airbnb platform, you're able to book not only a home but also an experience in various verticals such as adventure, sports, art, nightlife, and food. It seems obvious to you and me, but that is the largest vertical. It means that we, as a company, have been able to engage many food experts and food enthusiasts around the globe.

One of the OKR (note: Outcomes and Key Results) for the food team for 2018 and 2019 both is to bring in one of these culinary experience hosts to do their experience in the office. 

We will subsidize that cost and let them use our food spaces. It's a way to expose our employees, not just to our cuisine––the chefs of Airbnb––but to a local expert who is investing their time to be on our platform. For me, that has been a magical interpersonal success. I love meeting these experts, these connoisseurs of sorts. 

From a food–in–the–workplace standpoint, it reminds folks that food is much more than just a way to get fed, to not be hungry, that people have livelihoods around. People have made this their life's work. It's a special moment and a great break for those who have jobs where they never work with their hands. They'll get to come down to the kitchen and do emoji making class or learn how to make shumai or pierogi, do a coffee cupping or learn about natural wine. It's a nice way to bring the Airbnb product in house.

Love that. What has been your favorite experience so far?

My favorite experience was when we worked with two local restaurateurs. They came into Airbnb and taught us how to make their own famous porcini mushroom donuts, which was a total thrill. I had been to their restaurants, and they're delicious. That was fun! Some of my absolute favorite experiences have been not at Airbnb, but rather out in the real world when using the Airbnb platform. Certain things would be just a challenge to take out of their natural habitat and plant in a tech office. But that's just a small plug for the experiences platform. There's some amazing inventory there, and I think everybody should go check it out. 

How to design a food-conscious food program

Climate action and responsible consumption and production are two of the 17 sustainable development goals developed within the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and adopted by all the United Nations Member States in 2015.

What is the responsibility of a corporate food program to reduce and minimize its carbon footprint? And can you talk about what you do and how you do it at Airbnb?

I would start by saying I really appreciate the question. I believe it's essential to harness the power of individuals to make certain changes in their lifestyle. But I think it's going to come down to institutions with a lot of consolidated power to really move the needle.

“I’d like to see companies take climate change more seriously and integrate that into their own success metrics. And I want Airbnb as a large company to do that.”

I'm still sort of waiting on what we plan to do at Airbnb too offset what we promote, which is international or domestic travel. I took it upon myself, and I'm certainly not alone. The whole food leadership team is in agreement that we, as a program, can only influence the eating habits in the office. We can't do anything else. We were going to really take 2019, and probably subsequently 2020 and beyond, to really investigate both the footprint of the office and reduce it dramatically, if possible. 

The big ones are obviously around sourcing––and, of course, nothing is black and white. There are lots of competing arguments to be made around. 

I'll just give you an example. Conventional wisdom is that organic food is best. However, when you look at it from a lens of climate change and the amount of resources required, organic farming needs more land, the land use is greater. We have been looking at so many inputs to the program. One thing that we recently established was that certain meats and dairy as a product are increasingly taxing than others. 

Therefore, one day a week, we opt for a plant-based menu that is enforced across all of our hub offices. It has been a success in some places where there was a strong push towards acknowledging the reason behind that. In other places, it felt more like virtue signaling.

It made me realize that as a food team going cold turkey (I realized there is a pun there) was not successful when, when our job is also to balance customer satisfaction.

I believe wholeheartedly in making a program that supports the environment in the best way possible. Still, we need to make sure that we're bringing people along in that decision making. We did too drastic of a sort of a boomerang with the employees and met a lot of pushback. Fortunately, the food team has been given the authority to oversee food decisions, just like the engineering team is given authority to oversee engineering decisions. So we're really sticking to our guns.

We also think that probably an even larger piece than exactly how much like the carbon footprint of any individual food item is thoughtfully managing waste. We're starting a program in the back of house, where we will be weighing any waste generated there. We also do an education program with our chefs to ensure that they know how to use common byproducts that a lot of people don't consider as viable food staples. I can give a few examples off the top of my head. 

When we have a meal that features broccoli, of course, most people want to eat the broccoli florets. However, the stocks have nutritional value too. They have flavor. They shouldn't be discarded. We will take those, shave them finely and turn them into kimchi that we'll feature in our sandwich bar as an example. Or we make almond milk in-house. Almonds are, obviously, very water-intensive. And to not use the whole almond is sort of a sacrilege. So we take the almond meal, repurpose it, and make it into the house granola that we serve. More and more, we're trying to encourage our chefs not to waste any part of a produce item or an animal if we continue to source as much meat as we do.

How to prevent food waste and educate employees on this matter How about the employee side? What are some of the strategies that you use to prevent food waste at Airbnb?

We intentionally keep the plates quite small so that there isn't this tendency to want to fill them up just because there's space there. We also sometimes leave the bones in some of the meat that we serve (like a bone in a chicken thigh) to give the impression of more volume. That way, people aren't inclined to take too much on their first pass and then throw it in the bin. 

We certainly don't mind if people come back for seconds and thirds. However, keeping the illusion of a full plate is vital so that someone's eyes aren't bigger than their appetite. That's one strategy that we employ. 

The last is related to the fluctuation in diners. On any given day, we will probably have a surplus of food. A lot of what we can get repurposed into tomorrow's soup or a cold salad.

We don't try to obfuscate that. I think people definitely recognize yesterday's entree. But it's an essential part of the education process to let people know that there really isn't such a thing as bad food or old food. Food that has been out for a day can find new life in a new preparation. Occasionally when that isn't viable, we have a partnership with a local nonprofit who comes by three times a week to get any leftovers that have been prepared but can't be reused. They will distribute that food to local food shelters to avoid the worst outcome of all, which is that that food ends up in the landfill again.

And finally, and this is the last question. What's a nourishing workplace for you? 

That's beautiful. A nourishing workplace for me is one that considers all stakeholders, in particular, those who put all their work into making the food that you ultimately enjoy in your workplace. And one whereby food is really seen as a conduit for connectivity and belonging. Not just a utility.