DoorDash Helps Businesses Provide Meal Perks For Home-Based Workers

DoorDash has unveiled a program to let companies that in normal times provide office meal perks to continue offering meals to employees, whether they’re working from home or joining reduced-sized teams at the office.

Its new DoorDash for Work program consists of four offerings, some of which have been tested during recent months, the company said in announcing the new initiative in a Wednesday (Oct. 7) blog post by Broderick McClinton, head of DoorDash for Work.

One component is DashPass for Work, which lets companies give DashPass subscriptions to employees. “DashPass is a subscription that provides unlimited free delivery fees and reduced service fees from hundreds of thousands of restaurants across DoorDash and Caviar,” McClinton writes in the announcement. “DashPass for Work gives employees greater access to their favorite local restaurants in their neighborhoods and alleviates the stress of meal planning and prepping during busy working hours.”

Another offering, Expensed Meals, lets employers buy DoorDash meal credits and then allocate them to employees. Employees can use the credits to have meals delivered to their homes or offices. Managers are able to establish budgets for employees and then set restrictions governing the days and times of allowable meal purchases.

An offering called Group Orders is geared to companies where a significant number of employees have returned to working in offices. Group Orders is for companies “looking for reliable, safe, and delicious options to feed their teams,” according to the announcement. Individual employees can choose meals from a pre-selected restaurant and the chosen will be combined into one order for delivery and for billing to the company.

The final component of the new program is employee gift cards. The blog notes, “With work going remote, we’ve seen an increase in demand to use DoorDash gift cards in the corporate setting as a morale boost, as a performance perk, or as a new business or client gift.”

The new DoorDash for Work options were designed to reflect the results of a survey and with a goal of helping restaurants, many of which are struggling for survival amid the pandemic, find ways to expand business sales, DoorDash said in the announcement.

Among the findings of the survey of 1,000 American workers were that 90 percent miss at least one food-related benefit of the office; 85 percent say regular food delivery would increase their job satisfaction, and 75 percent say it also would improve their productivity; 49 percent overall — and 53 percent of workers with children — say they have had at least one work failure due to preparing food for themselves or family while working from home.