A group of around 20 people who worked in our Foundation during its formative years have an active WhatsApp group. A few are now well into their 70s while the others are still in the thick of an active professional life. Some weeks ago, members of this group greeted an old colleague on her birthday. Though such greetings are customary, this one took us all into a wonderful recall of that person’s culinary skills with everyone vividly remembering her many lovely lunch items. Very quickly the chat moved on to discuss how vital and energising these office lunch sessions were and how much they were integral to the happy working environment that became a distinctive feature of our organisation. Our dining place moved from the terrace of a rented building to the sylvan setting in our foundation’s own premises but we retained the tradition of always coming together (depending on work and travel schedules) for lunch. In any multi-functional group, there are tensions and conflict of views. Members might have argued just that morning but at lunch not only was there truce but they were sharing each other’s food. Our founding CEO who lived just one street away from our office, could have gone home for lunch but he always got his lunch box so that he could be part of the potluck, the banter and office-work news.

That day’s WA discussion set me thinking. My rational mind told me that the shared lunch culture might only be a small contributor to a happy team and work environment. I knew there would be many happy, cohesive and efficient teams who never did lunch together. So how should one view this discussion? Neither with the halo of rosy-tinted memory nor with the tired cynicism of a person who has worked for over 45 years in many settings and diverse teams. And so, I decided to ask a cross-section of friends and former colleagues for their views on the value and importance of the shared lunch culture and whether it contributes to an individual’s sense of belonging in an organisation and on workplace happiness.

Food for thought

One of my friends – we became buddies when we took the same chartered bus to our respective companies in the late 1980s – was utterly dismissive. He said, the lunch break is to feed oneself so that we have energy to do the afternoon’s work well. These lunches are just fertile ground for bickering about boss and work, for gossip and a waste of working time. Another friend – thoughtful, kind, a person of few words – said he was agnostic. He had spent the first few years in a team where five of them in their department shared lunch and it was a pleasant interlude in the day. As he moved up the hierarchy to another job and city, he began eating alone in his cabin. He did not miss the group lunch. For him too, lunch was just something to be done with so that he could get on with work.

A few friends brought in the most interesting insights from their factory canteen and the university cafeteria lunches. It so happens that I have been a part of both these environments. My memories of the factory canteen are vivid. Lunch was the place where the Quality Control Officer and Production Officer could pull each other’s leg even though they had been at loggerheads in a review meeting on the latest batch of crankshaft wheels. Our CEO would gravitate from table to table every day, depending on where the laughter was the loudest. For him, these 30 minutes were the best stressbuster. At times he would go to the table where the Product Development Manager was seated, to narrate an idea that he got from his latest visit to a customer. He was a formidable man whose displeasure at work could be withering and yet in all those years he unfailingly demonstrated that lunch was a sacrosanct haven for everyone.

Another friend, a corporate veteran said that the shared lunch worked brilliantly for him when he had to establish a new enterprise. During start-up phase, where everyone works in mission-mode, it was the daily potluck lunches that helped the bonding. A few years later as the organisation settled in, the potluck lunch gatherings were no longer a feature of his organisation.

Spoonful of wisdom

One of the most interesting insights came from a friend whose career has been neatly split between the corporate and the social sectors. His first job after his engineering degree from a town in Tamil Nadu was in the industrial area of Hyderabad. ‘Isolated anyway by language, the factory canteen brought an entirely new sensory shock. The first spoonful was literally a burning revelation.’ He is beholden for life to his colleagues, who seeing his predicament located a caterer to supply him a ‘mild’ lunch box. Soon, they started bringing him food from their home and a vibrant, six-member daily roundtable took shape, bringing together design, procurement, admin, and finance for cross-functional updates. He believes there was an undeniable spike in day-to-day workplace productivity. Within three months he had become fluent in Telugu and Hindi, opening new work opportunities that took him to Bengaluru, Africa, and other places. The lunch gathering of the mid-nineties never ended. Even today, these six colleagues, remain in touch and are as tight knit as ever.

The sharing of food – be it with strangers or friends, whether there is enough for us or not – is special to our culture. One knows of the brown bag culture in the west where people come to office meetings, open their own bag, eat their own lunch, and go their own way. Here, even today at our working lunch, if you are not alert, the tastiest kofta from your box will be niftily extracted by a sharp-eyed colleague. As for me, I know I rarely got to taste 10 percent of the peanuts in my lemon rice. One of my dearest colleagues, well, she has this habit of flicking all the peanuts from my box. I would not trade that pleasure for anything.

(S.Giridhar is one of the earliest members of Azim Premji Foundation)

Published on July 13, 2026