Tech firms are known for their lavish meals, but city says it damages local businesses 
 
 Free food has long been a perk of Silicon Valley. On the campuses of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, employees have access to high-end restaurants with pizza ovens, sushi counters, freshly baked pastries and ice cream. 
 
 However, as technology companies come under increasing pressure to deliver more value to the communities they inhabit, cities are clamping down on campus cafeterias in an attempt to support local restaurants. 
 
 In a highly unusual mandate, city officials have barred Facebook from serving free food to its employees when the tech company moves into a new office in Mountain View later this year – and the city of San Francisco hopes to follow suit. 
 
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 Two thousand Facebook employees are due to move into an office in a complex called The Village at San Antonio Center. In a 2014 agreement with the social network, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle this week, the city stipulated that tenants of the development cannot subsidise employee meals by more than 50%. Facebook can, however, cover the cost of employees’ food if they dine in restaurants that are open to the public. 
 
 The restriction was enforced after local restaurants complained that free meals at Google, the city’s largest employer, had damaged their business. 
 
 “We wanted to make sure businesses that were there were successful,” the councilman John McAlister told the Chronicle. 
 
 Neither Facebook nor Google responded to requests for comment. 
 
 Tech companies offer staff free food partly because some of their offices were built in suburban wastelands with few local restaurants, partly as a deal sweetener in a highly competitive job market, and partly to squeeze more working hours out of every day. 
 
 It’s a popular perk, and one that causes Facebook employees to joke about the “Facebook 15”, the inevitable weight gain in pounds that comes from being surrounded by so many free delicious treats. 
 
 In their efforts to satisfy tech workers’ various appetites, tech companies have poached some of the Bay Area’s best chefs, promising better pay and more sociable hours. 
 
 The rules for Facebook’s new office are designed to encourage the thousands of tech workers to spend some money in and integrate with the local community, rather than arriving in a bus each day and never leaving the building. 
 
 
 
 This is what the restaurant industry says has happened in San Francisco, where tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Yelp and Square were offered tax breaks in exchange for locating their offices in the Mid-Market neighbourhood. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. The rule is designed to get workers to engage with the local community. Photograph: Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images 
 
 “It’s great we’ve had an amazing economic boom where jobs have located into San Francisco over the last several years, but many of these new jobs come with full-scale kitchen operations that make it difficult for restaurants to have a good lunch business and find workers,” said Gwyneth Borden, the executive director of Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a trade group for restaurants in the city. 
 
 Borden is one of the supporters of a San Francisco city proposal, announced on Tuesday, that would ban on-site workplace cafeterias. 
 
 If approved, the measure would alter city planning laws to ban workplace cafeterias in any new developments, but would not be retroactive. 
 
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 “This is not a prohibition on catering or providing free food,” said Borden, noting that companies could instead give staff vouchers to buy food from local businesses. 
 
 “Yes, we want the jobs but the whole point is you get more foot traffic, restaurant and retail patrons and overall vitality in the streets. But if people are bussed in, go to work and never leave the building, the effect isn’t felt.” 
 
 Axing company cafeterias also means axing jobs that, depending on the company, can come with good pay and benefits. 
 
 In March, cafeteria workers at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters unionised, a move that secured $4.75 an hour in raises, affordable healthcare and a pension plan. The ban on having a free cafeteria in the Mountain View complex could mean losing well-paid jobs to minimum-wage jobs in nearby restaurants. 
 
 “We’re not convinced an outright ban makes a lot of sense,” said Ian Lewis, the research director at the labour union Unite Here. 
 
 “One of the main problems here is an affordability crisis where working people are getting forced out and we need more good well-paying jobs with good healthcare and pensions,” he said. 
 
 “If employee cafeterias provide those jobs that’s fine with us.” 
 
 Contact the author: olivia.solon@theguardian.com ||||| When Facebook moves into its new offices in Mountain View this fall, a signature Silicon Valley perk will be missing — there won’t be a corporate cafeteria with free food for about 2,000 employees. 
 
 In an unusual move, the city barred companies from fully subsidizing meals inside the offices, which are part of the Village at San Antonio Center project, in an effort to promote nearby retailers. The project-specific requirement passed in 2014, attracting little notice because the offices were years away from opening. 
 
 It came in response to local restaurants that said Google, the city’s biggest employer, was hurting their businesses by providing free meals, according to John McAlister, a Mountain View councilman. 
 
 “We wanted to make sure businesses that were there were successful,” McAlister said. 
 
 The daily banquets at big tech companies — fresh-made omelets for breakfast, hand-rolled sushi for lunch, braised chicken and kale for dinner — have become legendary. Google hired its first chef about 20 years ago, when the company had just 50 employees. Reviews of its corporate cuisine popped up on Bon Appetit, Serious Eats and Yelp. 
 
 New companies such as Facebook and LinkedIn matched the perk as they tried to lure employees away. Staffing the cafeterias became a booming business for the formerly sleepy field of corporate catering. But the in-house eating places have drawn customers and potential employees away from neighboring businesses, and city officials are concerned that local restaurants struggle and potentially bustling streets are empty as a result. 
 
 Under Mountain View’s rules for the Village complex, meals within the offices can’t be subsidized by more than 50 percent on a regular basis. Facebook can fully subsidize employees if they go to restaurants that are open to the public. 
 
 “It really was geared more around trying to make sure we didn’t have 400,000 square feet of office space with people that never left the building,” said Michael Kasperzak, a former Mountain View mayor who worked on the legislation. “If we have all these restaurants, we want this to be a successful development. If employers pay for it, that’s fine.” 
 
 After leaving office, Kasperzak went on to work as a consultant for WeWork, the large New York operator of co-working spaces. Though Facebook is the sole tenant for now, WeWork is managing Facebook’s facility and is considering a public food hall in the ground floor, according to city officials. 
 
 WeWork and Facebook declined to comment on the requirement. 
 
 “We found the location attractive because of its proximity to public transportation, housing and public-serving amenities like shops and restaurants,” said Facebook spokesman Jamil Walker. Unlike many tech campuses, the Village project is adjacent to a Caltrain station and includes housing. 
 
 The absence of an in-house cafeteria will help boost local retailers, said Steve Rasmussen, owner of the Milk Pail Market, a 44-year-old open-air produce market blocks from Facebook’s future office. 
 
 “A lot of small, independent restaurants had been impacted when some of these companies went in-house with their food offerings,” Rasmussen said. “I think collaboration is vital, and it makes total sense.” 
 
 Rasmussen is in talks with local restaurants to stock ready-to-eat meals at Milk Pail Market, which currently lacks such fare. 
 
 “They’re very excited about what can we do to collaborate with the young folks who will come in with Facebook,” he said. 
 
 Mountain View has been seeking other concessions from tech giants. A November ballot measure proposes a per-employee tax that would hit Google the hardest. Last year, a new Google campus called Charleston East will be partially open to the public, including restaurants that anyone can dine in. 
 
 While the cafeteria provision only applies to the Facebook site, it’s possible Mountain View could seek to impose similar conditions on Google’s next major expansion in the North Bayshore area, where it has its headquarters campus. 
 
 Mountain View Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga said it’s possible Google could help subsidize the rent for small businesses on its property or have agreements with retailers to patronize their businesses. 
 
 Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on its North Bayshore plans regarding small businesses. 
 
 Abe-Koga said the concept of tech companies offering free food was uncommon 20 years ago, and cities were in favor of companies in business parks having their own cafeterias because it reduced traffic. With projects like Village at San Antonio now featuring a mix of housing, office and retail, getting people outside their offices to frequent nearby businesses is key, she said. 
 
 Mountain View’s neighbors don’t have plans to impose similar requirements on employee cafeterias. Cupertino Vice Mayor Rod Sinks said it’s already common to see Apple employees dine at local restaurants; the company charges employees for meals, making outside offerings relatively more attractive. Apple is more concerned with secrecy: It built a glassy restaurant that resembles one of its gadget stores on Alves Drive in Cupertino. A stand-alone building, it’s in walking distance of some Apple offices. Though the building is on a commercial street, the public can’t enter unless they’re the guest of an employee. 
 
 In San Jose, there are no prohibitions on businesses offering free food, with the exception of its City Hall. When it was designed more than a decade ago, there were concerns that a cafeteria there would compete with local food businesses, so the city didn’t build one. Adobe’s downtown headquarters has partially subsidized cafeterias. 
 
 Near San Jose’s Diridon Station, Google is planning another huge development. There has been no talk of restricting subsidized meals there, said Nanci Klein, San Jose’s assistant director of economic development. 
 
 Chris Foley, co-owner of the Market, a food hall underneath Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, hopes that one day the city will follow Mountain View’s lead. Restaurants have opened in the Mid-Market neighborhood in hopes of gaining customers from the tech companies there, but a number have shuttered and struggled. If there were no meals served inside those offices, that would greatly benefit restaurants and food vendors like those in the Market, he said. 
 
 “Having (tech workers) in their offices and not engaging with the community isn’t really good for the community or these small businesses,” Foley said. 
 
 Zendesk, a customer-support software business located a couple of blocks down Market, doesn’t offer free lunch. Instead, CEO Mikkel Svane has recommended employees go to nearby restaurants such as Tu Lan and Farmerbrown. Once a month, the company pays for a group of employees to try a new restaurant, said spokeswoman Courtney Mundell. 
 
 Wendy Lee and Roland Li are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: wlee@sfchronicle.com, roland.li@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thewendylee, @rolandlisf
– There will be no free ice cream for the 2,000 employees set to fill Facebook's new office in Mountain View, Calif., later this year. Like many other tech companies in Silicon Valley, Facebook fills the bellies of its employees with free food, from oven-baked pizza to hand-rolled sushi. But that appears to be changing: In an effort to lend support to local restaurants, the city of Mountain View has blocked Facebook from subsidizing cafeteria meals by more than 50%, though it can fully subsidize meals had at outside restaurants. "We wanted to make sure businesses that were there were successful," councilman John McAlister tells the San Francisco Chronicle of the 2014 agreement, which he says came in response to complaints that Google's free employee meals were hurting local businesses. The goal was "to make sure we didn't have 400,000 square feet of office space with people that never left the building" to visit a local business, says former Mountain View mayor Michael Kasperzak. It's an idea that caught officials' attention in San Francisco. Though it "could mean losing well-paid [cafeteria] jobs to minimum-wage jobs in nearby restaurants," per the Guardian, two city legislators on Tuesday announced a proposal that would ban workplace cafeterias in new developments. "You get more foot traffic, restaurant and retail patrons, and overall vitality in the streets," says a rep for the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which is in support of the proposal. "If people are bussed in, go to work and never leave the building, the effect isn't felt."