Office Landlord Partners with Food Delivery Service

The FCC recently took an action to promote better multifamily access to broadband by prohibiting profitable revenue-sharing agreements between providers and property owners. Good thing that doesn’t affect a deal between the New York City-based office offerings of Vornado Realty Trust and food-ordering platform vendor Sharebite.

The two recently announced a partnership, in which Sharebite will become the exclusive office meal solution providing group orders for Vornado buildings, which cover 20.6 million square feet of Manhattan office space in 33 properties, according to the release.

Employees in these buildings will be able to order without delivery fees from such chains as Sweetgreen, Cava, and Dig. The service delivers the food to contactless drop-off points in the offices. The way Sharebite describes its group ordering, individually labeled orders arrive together. Presumably, employees could place orders, which the company could combine and deliver.

According to information from the company’s PR firm, tenants are not required to use the system and can bring in food anyway they wish. Supposedly, the arrangement was already ongoing in 40 Vornado buildings by the end of January. 

There is supposedly no financial arrangement between Vornado and Sharebite. The former has an effectively free amenity to offer its tenants and Sharebite gets access to a somewhat captive audience.

Food delivery to office buildings is clearly nothing new, but the arrangements are typically not so formal. Typically, partnerships are with the restaurants that provide the meals, although that could include ghost kitchens with relationships to existing food brands. 

Chicago-based Fooda, which claims to work nationally, provides popup restaurants, employer-paid meals, cafeteria replacement, and, yes, delivery. Relish takes orders from employees, then lets the individuals know when the food is scheduled to arrive, placed on a display in an office building for pickup.

By an exclusive official arrangement with Vornado, Sharebite would count on a higher uptake by employees and trading the higher utilization for delivery fees.

The delivery services tend to stress a number of purported benefits for employees, and indirectly then for employers, such as better employee engagement, happier workers, better recruiting and retention, higher productivity by keeping people in the office for more hours, and a health-and-wellness aspect that can lead to decreased insurance costs.

Another potential benefit for the building owners and operators, beyond happier tenants, is the potential for luring people back into the office.