There’s usually a trigger. Maybe it’s the third complaint this month about food delivery drivers blocking the lobby. Maybe someone from HR forwarded an article about how the company two floors up just launched a staff meal programme and retention improved. Or maybe it was the food poisoning incident from that restaurant around the corner that finally got the conversation going.
Whatever started it, you’re now the facility manager looking into daily office catering. And it’s more complicated than it looks.
Not the food part. The food is the easy part. It’s the logistics, the formats, the minimums, the question of whether your building can even support what you’re imagining — that’s where it gets interesting.
First question: does your office actually need this?
Genuinely worth asking. Not every office does.
A team of 15 in a co-working space? Probably not. The economics don’t work at that scale for contract-based catering. Most providers — us included — need a minimum of around 50 daily meals to make a contract feasible. For events and one-off orders, 20 works. But for daily service? Fifty is roughly the floor.
That said, if you’re above that number and any of these sound familiar, a structured programme makes sense:
Your people leave the building for lunch. Every day. And they’re gone for 45 minutes to an hour by the time they walk, queue, eat, and walk back. We’ve talked to facility managers who tracked it, and the average off-site lunch break runs somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes in Riyadh. On-site meals bring that down to about 20. That’s a meaningful chunk of productive time being spent in traffic and shawarma queues.
You don’t have a kitchen. This is more common than you’d expect. Lots of the newer office towers in KAFD, the Diplomatic Quarter, and upper Al-Olaya were designed with open floor plans and glass-walled meeting rooms. Nobody thought to include a kitchen because the architects assumed everyone would eat out. Now the tenant wants staff catering and there’s literally no infrastructure for it.
Your workforce is diverse. When your floor has Saudi, Jordanian, Indian, Filipino, British, and Egyptian employees all eating from the same programme, you can’t just default to one cuisine and call it done. Deliberate menu planning becomes necessary rather than nice-to-have.
Buffet or boxed? This decision shapes everything else
We get asked about this in every initial conversation, and the honest answer is that it depends on your office more than your preference.
Buffet works if you have the space
You need a dining area. Real one, with tables and seating that can handle your lunch rush without people standing in the corridor eating off paper plates. You also need space for service stations, somewhere for serving staff to work during the meal, and a cleanup routine that doesn’t interfere with afternoon meetings.
The upside of buffet is choice. People like picking their food. And there’s a communal aspect to sitting down together that boxed meals don’t replicate. Some HR directors we work with specifically want buffet because the shared lunch break is part of their workplace culture strategy.
The downside is overhead. Serving staff, setup, teardown, cleaning, and — in Riyadh’s climate — constant temperature monitoring for dishes sitting on the buffet line. During summer, food safety becomes a real operational concern with buffet service. Hot food cools. Cold food warms. Both happen faster than you think when it’s 46°C outside and the building’s loading dock faces the afternoon sun.
Boxed meals work when space is the constraint
No dining hall? Staggered lunch schedules? Multiple floors with no central eating area? Boxed meals solve all of that. Each meal arrives sealed, portioned, ready to eat. Distribution is literally a table in the break room. No serving staff. No dining hall. No infrastructure investment.
We wrote about this shift in more detail in our piece on why boxed meal catering has become the standard for Saudi corporates. If your office doesn’t have a proper dining setup, that article will probably answer half your questions about the format.
Or do both
A lot of our Riyadh clients run a hybrid. Buffet at headquarters where there’s a proper dining area. Boxed meal delivery at the satellite offices and smaller locations that just don’t have the space. One provider. Two formats. Matched to what each site can actually support.
What to look for in a daily catering provider
This isn’t like choosing a caterer for a one-off event where the risk is one bad afternoon. Daily catering is a relationship that affects your employees’ experience every working day. So the evaluation criteria matter.
Can they actually reach your office reliably?
Riyadh traffic is the variable that most catering sales decks ignore. A production facility in the industrial south serves KAFD on a very different timeline than it serves Diplomatic Quarter. And Digital City? Depending on the route and the time of day, that’s another story entirely.
Ask where the kitchen is. Ask about fleet size. And check the provider’s service coverage across Riyadh’s business districts. A caterer who’s honest about where they can and can’t deliver on time is more useful than one who says yes to everything and then shows up 40 minutes late on the first Tuesday.
Menu rotation — because week three is when people start complaining
Daily catering that runs for months needs a structured menu cycle. Four weeks is the minimum rotation before dishes start feeling repetitive. And within that cycle, there needs to be real variety — Saudi dishes, international options, lighter meals, heartier ones.
Dietary management at this scale has to be systematic. You need documented processes for halal (the baseline), vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and allergen-sensitive meals. If the provider handles special diets by someone remembering that “Ahmed doesn’t eat gluten” — that’s not a system. That’s a memory, and it’ll fail the week that person is on holiday.
Contract flexibility — because your office won’t stay the same
Headcounts change. People get hired. People leave. Departments relocate. A floor gets renovated. A project ends and 30 contractors go home.
A flexible business catering contract that allows headcount adjustments with reasonable notice is far more practical than a rigid 12-month lock-in. Some organisations we work with start with a short-term agreement as a trial, run it for two or three months, and then move to a long-term contract once they’re confident the setup works. Sensible approach.
The cost question
How much does it cost? Everyone asks, and the answer is always “it depends” — which is annoying but accurate. Format, headcount, menu complexity, delivery frequency, district logistics. All of these move the number.
What we tell facility managers is to stop comparing per-meal costs in isolation. Compare total costs. Add up what your organisation currently spends on meal allowances, food delivery subsidies, and the productivity impact of employees disappearing for an hour at lunchtime. When you run the full comparison, structured catering often comes out cost-neutral. Sometimes cheaper.
We’re putting together a more detailed breakdown of this in our guide to the ROI of structured staff meal programmes, including a framework for building the business case that your finance team will actually read.
Start with a pilot, not a leap of faith
Two weeks. Real meals. Real feedback from your team. That’s the best way to evaluate whether office catering works for your specific situation.
Pick your biggest office or the one with the most complaints about current meal arrangements. Measure how many people actually use the service. Collect feedback — not just satisfaction scores, but comments about what they’d change. Compare the trial cost against what you’re spending now on meal-related expenses. The data will tell you whether to scale up, adjust the format, or try something different.
Avala supports offices across KAFD, Diplomatic Quarter, Al-Olaya, Al-Malqa, and other Riyadh business districts. Both boxed and buffet formats, produced from Leylaty Hospitality Group’s Central Production Unit — operating in Saudi Arabia since 1948.