The Workplace April 17, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Hide the Doritos! Here Comes HR

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Google now keeps a 50-50 mix of healthy snacks and junk food

But within weeks, Baker says, the potato chips and candy bars were back. Junk moves.

That's why some companies are getting to employees' stomachs through their wallets. After Caterpillar offered garden burgers in its cafeteria for a buck last year, sales soared fivefold, to 2,500 a month. At mortgage giant Freddie Mac (FRE), workers who order six healthy meals in the cafeteria get the seventh free. Florida Power & Light, Dow Corning, and Sprint Nextel (S) all charge more for unhealthy food (the so-called calorie tax) and less for healthier fare. At Pitney Bowes (PBI), they moved the desserts away from the cash register to curb impulse buys.

Some companies feel like a re-education camp. Microsoft's (MSFT) food honcho, Mark Freeman, created a color-coded system of icons to help make the healthy stuff as recognizable as a Snickers bar. In each of Microsoft's 31 cafeterias, there are icons for vegan, gluten-free, organic, sustainable, sugar-free, carb control, and nondairy. Freeman has also made the company's metropolis-like headquarters a trans-fat-free zone. At first, "everybody was yelling and screaming about the healthy food," says Freeman. But the Microserfs are coming around.

For those who don't, there is always tough love. HR types swarmed the New York Marriott Marquis hotel in February to learn how to implement lean-worker campaigns, biggest-loser contests, and strategic-eating seminars. During breaks over yogurt and fruit, the attendees swapped war stories about how overweight workers eat up health-care dollars. As one executive from a major software company quipped: "We're waging a war on fat people." Junk food lovers, beware. These people are serious.

Links

What's behind our gluttony; overweight workers and the bottom line

Fat Incentives

In his new book, The Fattening of America: How The Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What To Do About It, health economist Eric A. Finkelstein says that expanding waistlines can be blamed on the food industrial complex. "There are simply many more incentives to gain weight than to lose it," he writes. "Successful obesity strategies need to do exactly the opposite of where the economy is taking us. They need to make it cheaper and easier to be thin—not fat." Finkelstein refers dismissively to the "ObesEconomy"—those gyms, nutrition gurus, diet foods, and drugs designed to help people shed pounds.

Hefty Costs

Overweight employees are slower and less efficient than their less portly colleagues, according to a study published in the January issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine—costing an average $1,800 a year in lost productivity.

With John Cady

Reader Discussion

 

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