Snap is ending employees’ cash food benefit, citing ‘on-site’ meals ahead of full RTO mandate

• For the last three years Snapchat workers received a weekly stipend for food.
• That benefit is disappearing as Snap wants to get people in the office at least four days a week.
• Instead of the food benefit, workers have been told to “explore” on-site lunch offerings.

Snap is discontinuing a benefit that allowed employees to buy food during the work week.

The perk was a weekly stipend of $60 to $80 given to Snapchat parent company employees on a “meal card” or as a payroll stipend. It began in the early days of the pandemic when employees suddenly lost access to catered food at Snap’s Santa Monica headquarters. It also provided Snap employees working in other offices that did not provide catered food with parity on a company perk they had never had access to before.

The end of the benefit is yet another sign that the era of tech excess, defined by lavish perks, eye-popping pay packages, and entitled employees, is coming to an end. After more than a year of mass layoffs across the industry, including at Snap, many companies are offering lower pay and fewer perks, expecting higher productivity, and keeping a closer eye on who is working where.

Snap’s meal card benefit is not being replaced and will expire in October. Instead, Snap stated in a brief note to employees that its “on-site food program” is undergoing “enhancements” in preparation for September, when all employees are expected to return to the office nearly full-time. Lunch will now be served five days a week in all Snap offices. During the pandemic, Snap implemented a “remote-first” policy for its employees. Then, as Insider reported last fall, it reversed course and informed employees that they would be expected to work in the office at least four days per week this year.

“With our global offices reaching the necessary capacity to return to full-on-site operations early this fall, we will sunset the meal card and related payroll stipend programs,” Snap said in a note. “This timing allows for an overlapping period during which team members can explore the new lunch services that are available daily in the office.”

A Snap representative declined to comment.

Many Snap employees have groaned at the prospect of returning to work this year, with one calling it “total bs.” Although, according to a person familiar with the company, the company-wide RTO mandate has already been delayed at least twice this year. “It’s been a mess,” the individual added. RTO was initially scheduled for the end of February, but some offices maintained a more flexible policy. Then, in May, the company discovered that the drinking water in HQ had six times the EPA recommended limit of lead and 15 times the limit of copper.

A full RTO is now scheduled for early September. According to a person familiar with the situation, some employees see the elimination of the meal stipend as not only another cost-cutting measure, but also as a way to encourage people to come into the office more frequently.

After Apple, Snap was one of the first tech companies to reveal such a strict RTO policy to employees. Since then, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has reversed its own “distributed-first” work policy, instructing employees who were not hired for fully remote jobs to come into an office at least three days a week. Amazon, too, is requiring corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week, and is even tracking down those who fail to do so, according to Insider.

RTO has proven to be a contentious issue thus far. After three years of successfully working from home, many employees see their employers’ insistence that they now work from an office as having little to do with actual work and more to do with expensive commercial leases on office space and a desire among management to exert control. Many tech workers have protested RTO mandates by working from home. Despite his demands, Elon Musk’s constant firings at Twitter have not been enough to get workers back into the office full-time.

Are you a Snap employee or someone else with knowledge to offer? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, 949-280-0267 on Signal, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Use a non-work device to contact you.