 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. 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,” the councilman John McAlister told the Chronicle. Facebook can, however, cover the cost of employees’ food if they dine in restaurants that are open to the public. “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. 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. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment on its North Bayshore plans regarding small businesses. The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger Read more 
 
 “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. 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. 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.
– 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."