The End of Lunch

Corporate perks like in-office pool tables and food-truck Fridays disappeared with the end of the pandemic. But five years on, the perk that seems to be the biggest casualty is unexpected: It’s lunch itself. 

Data suggests that the noontime meal, as a norm, is over: 62% of workers don’t take a break from their desks at all. At least once a week, nearly half skip lunch altogether, according to the 2024 Lunch Report by ezCater. Meanwhile, restaurant traffic has declined for eight consecutive quarters, with Q1 2025 seeing a 7% year-over-year drop (business dining typically makes up roughly 10% of all restaurant spending). “Lunch breaks of the past are exactly that—in the past,” says Iktimal Daneshvar, vice president for recruitment process outsourcing at Korn Ferry. 

To be sure, both business lunches and lunch breaks still happen. Roughly half of states still mandate lunch breaks—an eagerly anticipated midday reprieve for shift workers. But for most knowledge workers, taking lunch is no longer typical. Those who previously had three business lunches per week now have just one. Many grab a quick salad or wrap to eat alone, or nothing at all. “The prevalent behavior is to have lunch on the go or at your desk,” says Daneshvar. The shift is partially driven by the increase in per-meal costs: The US government’s per-diem allowance for meals and incidentals rose from $59 in 2024 to $68 in 2025, leading many companies to rein in their corporate-dining budgets. 

For remote workers and those with more flexible bosses, lunch has been repurposed as an hour of personal time, typically for picking kids up from school, heading to the gym, or seeing a therapist, says Maria Amato, senior client partner at Korn Ferry. Lunch itself is no longer part of the equation. “Most employees I know don’t take a dedicated lunch break,” she says. Instead, they eat while working or scarf down their lunch in ten minutes before returning to their desks. 

That only leads to colleagues spending less time working together, in yet another blow to corporate culture, experts say. Indeed, new data from JLL suggests office employees are spending less time together, period: They’re swiping in at their usual time in the morning, but are leaving work much earlier than they did before the pandemic—an average of 26 minutes earlier in San Francisco, and 18 minutes earlier in Dallas.

Many business-lunch restaurants are far less crowded than they were pre-pandemic, but still frequented once or twice a week by employees high on the org chart. “The primary reason I go to the city now is to meet with people over a meal—I participated in two last week,” says HR expert Ron Porter, senior partner at Korn Ferry, who lives outside of New York City. Conversations that once took place over meals now take place virtually, he says.

HR experts see the nosedive in fraternizing at lunch as a cause for concern. A decade ago, at many corporations, the majority of employees had lunch in the cafeteria on most days; longer-term employees commonly ate with one another for decades, even if they no longer worked together. Today, few employees have those sorts of daily social connections—and that’s a problem for retention. “It makes companies less sticky,” says Porter.

In the past, a long-term employee who loved their colleagues might not be swayed by a 10% compensation increase from a competitor; they’d consider moving only for a 20% to 25% boost. “Now it’s easier for people to leave,” says Porter. 

Learn more about Korn Ferry’s Organizational Transformation capabilities. 

Read more This Week in Leadership articles