“In the London tech scene everyone knows everybody,” says David Jenkins, founder of Feastly. He should know: he feeds most of them. Chef to the likes of Improbable, BuzzFeed, Cisco Meraki and Quantcast, Feastly is the startup that caters for startups. Following in the footsteps of Silicon Valley, London’s tech scene is harnessing the power of lunch, and Feastly is leading the way.
Every day, Feastly supplies an average of 17 dishes to its clients: a salad bar, a starter, a main course and a selection of sides (without, sadly, any dessert). “Before us it used to be tray bake shepherd pies or lasagnes,” says Jenkins. But now, with meals starting from £12 a head, food from Feastly is an event.
Take Tuesday’s menu, themed “Seville”: chorizo, manchego, and slow roasted chicken adorn the three courses. There’s also a salad bar, which today hosts wild rice, chickpeas, olives & grapes. Tomorrow it will be Mexican. “These companies don’t want just healthy staff,” says Jenkins, “they want productive staff.” As a result, menus go easy on deep friend and heavy food. On Fridays, fish and chips are allowed, but there is always a healthier, vegan option to avoid the post-lunch lull. The weekly menu is the same for all of Feastly’s clients, largely with the same healthy requirements.
The food isn’t just about creating a productive team. “Tech companies are always competing with each other to win the most talented staff,” says Jenkins, “and I think this is how they do it.” As a rule, Improbable – which recently raised more than $540 million (£421m) in funding for its massive simulations – conducts its interviews just before lunch. Then potential employees are invited to enjoy a meal in the canteen, where they are buttered up on Feastly’s slow cooked chicken. The takeaway: they could be catered for every day; sometimes with breakfast.
With menus entitled “Leban-easy Peasy Feastly Squeezy”, and “Burger Town BYO”, London’s startups are a very particular market. “These tech companies like what is now, and the food really needs to match that,” says Jenkins. But although the food must have variety, it also needs to be simple. At first, Feastly tried intricate amuse-bouches, but, explains Jenkins, “they didn’t want that; they want burritos and street food.” Thanks to access to startups’ Slack channels, Feastly is privy to daily feedback. “If they don’t like it, we hear about it,” Jenkins adds.
And what they really like is food that’s fast. “There is nothing these companies hate more than waiting,” says Jenkins. Before the in-house catering trend, most of London’s tech staff congregated in Clerkenwell’s Leather Lane or Angle’s Exmouth food markets. That meant queues, or (just as bad) time spent chatting and loitering. “If startups are paying a developer £45 an hour, and 45 minutes are spent getting lunch because of a queue, they hate that.”
As a result, inhouse catered food is fine-tuned for efficiency, with multiple buffets to prevent congestion. Often staff bring their food back to their desks, spending about 20 minutes for lunch in total. Feastly record how much food is consumed everyday and how much is left, creating a database system of their own. “We try to get as techy as possible to keep up with these guys,” says Jenkins.
Like its clientele, Feastly’s team are young. In 2011, aged 26, Jenkins founded Sushi Rolls, providing sushi in bulk to a small group of London offices. The popularity of Sushi Rolls led him to found Feastly in 2015. (The company shares a name, but no connection, with the dining club marketplace.) By 2017, Jenkins had hired head chef Dan Howes, managing a team of 35.
“It was really by word of mouth that these companies heard of us,” says Jenkins. ‘We had companies calling up like, ‘Hey I had a great lunch at Improbable, can you cook for us?’”. By 2018, Feastly had won the contract for 12 of London’s startups.
Now, Feastly has its eyes set on Silicon Valley. “When the American counterparts of our customers come over, they always say they prefer our food to what they get at home,” says Jenkins. “I think we have the capacity to do much more.”
Updated March 22, 2018: The article has been updated to more accurately reflect Feastly's menu
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
