At the Google Visitor Experience at Gradient Canopy, an important aspect of Google’s culture will be accessible to the public for the first time: our food program. The new Cafe @ Mountain View is our first-ever public-facing dining experience, allowing the community to purchase food and share in our sustainability priorities and guidelines in supporting the planet.
Since 1999, our food program has played an important role in fostering Google’s culture of creativity, collaboration and community. By offering delicious, nutritious meals in convivial spaces, we’re working to support human connection and the exchange of ideas. Our meals have inspired countless innovations — including Gmail, which was born out of a conversation over lunch in one of our cafes.
Google’s food program has always been about community, both creating it on our campuses, and connecting to our broader regions via food sourcing and preparation. One of our central culinary principles is care for the community, meaning we understand that the choices we make around food have a ripple effect within and beyond Google. From the menus we create, to where we buy our food, to how we prepare it, we are constantly thinking about how our food program can make a positive impact on local supply chains and our broader planet.
Our food program leads forward-thinking partnerships and sustainability initiatives to seed positive change and pave the way for a better food systems future. Our culinarians design dishes inspired by local, seasonal ingredients thanks to our relationships with local suppliers. We carefully vet ingredient suppliers and work with those who uphold our values including sustainability, diverse business ownership and community upliftment. To minimize our carbon footprint, we prioritize suppliers who practice regenerative agriculture, upcycling and minimal packaging, and choose local over air-freighted products whenever possible. In this way, we’re nudging the food and beverage industry towards responsible practices that are better for the environment and the communities that nourish us.
Besides ingredient sourcing, we focus on two key sustainability practices in our food program: food waste reduction and the elimination of single-use plastics. We know that about 35% of all food produced for human consumption, or about 133 billion pounds of food, is wasted every year. To support Google’s sustainability goals, we’re aiming to send zero food waste to the landfill by 2025. How? We have a three-part approach focused on preventing waste during food sourcing and procurement, improving our kitchens and cafes by using technology to cut back on waste in our kitchen operations, and making sure excess food is repurposed or disposed of properly. From 2014 through 2021, we prevented nearly 10 million pounds of food from entering landfills.
We’re also working hard to reduce plastic in our food spaces. We buy bulk and choose products with innovative, minimal packaging when possible, and we started to implement using wire cages to transport products. We also looked at how we can use a new yogurt bar experience to replace single-use yogurt cups and provide snacks in bulk bin containers to keep single-use packaging out of waste streams.
