Key Insight: Employer meal programs become a strategic employee experience with a well-crafted platform.
Expert Quote: "The level of quality and logistics needs to be above and beyond for employers," says Katie Egan, GM at DoorDash for Business.
Supporting Data: Companies spend thousands–millions annually on employee meals, driving demand for well-managed platforms.
Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review
Providing meals is a universally-pleasing
"There's a level of quality and logistics that needs to happen above and beyond what it might take for someone to deliver dinner to your home on Friday night," Egan says. "If I'm spending that much money as a company, or I've got thousands of employees who are using a service every day, I expect that things are going to be completely seamless, and if [it's not], they get resolved immediately and in a way that is in line with what I need as a company."
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Global meal delivery platform DoorDash, originally founded in 2013, offers consumers access to a wide variety of local food and grocery delivery and pickup options on one site. DoorDash for Business builds on this foundation, offering tools that allow employer clients to easily predict and manage spending, set up various meal offerings for everything from
Serving as GM since 2023 has given Egan the opportunity to continue her long-time passion for achieving business success by figuring out what customers need and constructing effective solutions. With previous roles at Amazon and food delivery platform Caviar, Egan understands how to blend technology with a human touch.
She points out that when companies are dropping thousands to millions of dollars on food each year, a high-quality human touch element is essential: From on-site managers to vetted delivery drivers to live customer support, she has made an "elevated level of service" part of the platform's appeal. Walk-throughs are done ahead of time to account for any challenges, support team members are stationed on site to help with delivery and customer service reps are available to help with additional needs or questions.
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But beyond her customers, Egan prioritizes authentic leadership, too. She shares her approach to management, why free lunch is a worthwhile benefit, and how she connects with her team to achieve optimal performance.
You served as DoorDash's chief of staff following the onset of COVID — how did this help prepare you for your current role?
The chief of staff role helped me develop empathy for how companies need to make decisions, especially as they're growing and in times of major uncertainty. I got this great understanding of how the company has to think and make hard decisions, and some of the considerations at that level of decision making, and a real empathy for the role that each functional leader plays — teams that I had not been as closely exposed to in my previous roles as a GM.
After a great two-year immersion as chief of staff, thinking about the company and the leaders of the company as my core audience, it ended up creating this really nice opportunity where I could step into a general management role, which was a type of role I was really comfortable with, but with this really deep audience understanding that I never would have gotten had I not taken the chief of staff position.
How does DoorDash raise the bar for meeting the meal needs of its own workforce?
If employees are on the road, they've got a travel per diem budget. We're going to feed you breakfast, lunch and dinner. If they're in one of our local offices, employees get a daily budget to order lunch. This gives employees the flexibility to place a group order so everybody's food comes together and they can eat together. [Or] they can order lunch at the beginning of the day, it'll arrive, and our on-site support will put it in a rack and they can grab it between meetings.
By having a budget, but not dictating the way that the order needs to be placed, we give teams the flexibility to eat together or just work together, but still get fed and not have food be a massive headache in their day.
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How do you connect with your team, and how does this influence its success?
If you lead with humanity — here's who I am as a person — and then create an environment where the team feels like they can bring themselves to work, I find that they tend to do better work.
I send everyone who joins my team an "About Me" document, something [I learned] from one of my mentors at DoorDash. When he did this, I thought it was going to be, here's my working style, here are my preferences, Slack me for this, email me for that. It was actually, here's my story, here's who I am as a person. And then at the very end, three things about work. It was inspiring to me, because it's easy to figure out some of these working preferences. But how often does a leader really lead with, here's who I am and why I am, and I encourage you to also be you. And by the way, we're going to be building really exciting stuff together. People feel like they can bring their ideas to the table, they can be themselves, and they feel like they can bring you in if there's a challenge.
