There is something to be said about being able to keep your employees from disappearing from the office for 30-60 minutes for lunch in the middle of the day.
Think about it, if you have a chef preparing food in your office, you and your team can work right up until the minute the food is ready, take a 15 second walk and be seated at a meal. When you are done, you walk 15 seconds back to your desk.
At the end of the day, it depends on how you value your team's time.
That actually sounds like a really bad idea. No exercise, food delivered nearly to your mouth, sit for an hour, go back to work immediately after eating?
How about: walk 20 minutes to food, eat something different every day, relax for 20 minutes getting back to work, get fresh air.
Part of it is about incentive alignment. There's about 100 ways to make food 1% tastier with 5% more calories. Restaurants make money from food that is tasty and perceived as healthy, regardless of whether it's healthy or not so they tend to utilize the full arsenal of tricks.
When you have a chef in house, they're being paid to make the food to your specifications so it can often be significantly healthier.
The benefits of chef-cooked food (vs. delivery) are more subjective, but I can see situations in which an argument could be made for a net benefit to the startup. If you make an effort to restrict yourself to healthy food (along with other "healthy" lifestyle choices, such as consistent and sufficient sleep), you can realize significant productivity benefits in the types of white collar work that being part of a startup typically entails.
My company works in the same space as Thumbtack, and we eat the same amazing food. The expense is far less than you'd think due to economies of scale.
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING beats a home cooked meal, and that's what the very talented Thea delivers. Good, wholesome food simply cannot be matched in a restaurant.
Early this week Thea was sick and we had to settle for Zero Cater. Zero cater is OK, but everyone was glad when Thea came back.
As for breaks to think, people go for walks. People go sit on a couch for awhile. There's no requirement for everyone to actually eat lunch together. You can eat at your desk if you want. You can even go out to eat if you want, but nobody does because they don't want to miss out on the yummy food ;-)
Hmm. I wonder what the average investor might think about that?