Should you feed your London team with a digital catering programme or build an in-house canteen? It is a real decision for growing offices, and the right answer depends on your size, your space and how much flexibility you need. Here is a clear-eyed comparison to help you choose.

The cost comparison

An in-house canteen carries fixed costs whether or not people show up: kitchen fit-out, equipment, staff and ongoing maintenance. A digital catering programme is variable: you pay per meal, so spend tracks actual attendance. For most London offices, especially with hybrid patterns where headcounts swing week to week, variable cost is both cheaper and far easier to predict.

Space, staffing and flexibility

A physical canteen needs square footage that London rent makes expensive, plus people to run it. A digital programme needs neither: meals are prepared off-site and delivered, and with a full-service option they are set up on-site for you. It also flexes instantly, you can change days, menus or headcount without renegotiating anything, which suits a team that is still growing or changing shape.

When an in-house canteen still makes sense

To be fair, an in-house canteen can make sense at large, stable scale, on a single site with hundreds of people in every day and the space and appetite to run a food operation. If that is you, the fixed costs spread across enough meals to compete. For most London offices below that scale, or with hybrid working, the maths and the hassle point the other way.

The digital canteen alternative

heykantine! gives you the best of a canteen without the kitchen: a recurring daily lunch run through an app, where employees order what they want, food arrives fresh on your chosen days, and you set a flexible subsidy. It works from around 50 people, scales with hybrid attendance, and keeps the admin close to zero. You get the daily shared-lunch culture of a canteen, with variable cost, no fit-out and no staffing.

Making the call for your London office

If you have a very large, stable, single-site team, an in-house canteen is worth modelling. For almost everyone else in London, a digital programme like heykantine! delivers the same daily benefit with lower, more predictable cost and far more flexibility. Start by mapping your real in-office headcount across the week, and the right answer usually becomes obvious.