Cayenne pepper ginger shots, homemade lemon tarts, and Michelin-starred chefs — here's what employees at Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies are offered for free

Facebook snacks food meal

Silicon Valley's tech giants have taken workplace dining to the next level, with themed restaurants, gourmet menus, and stunning designs — and at many companies, it's all free.

But employers seeking to offer their staff subsidized meals won't have that option if the city of San Francisco follows through with a policy that would ban new construction of workplace cafeterias. The proposal is an effort to encourage tech employees to stimulate the local economy by eating at restaurants within the community.

The nearby city of Mountain View, California, already enforces the restriction, which will forbid Facebook from building an on-site cafeteria when it opens its offices there this fall. However, the proposal won't affect companies with existing cafeterias, like Google, Apple, and Facebook's main offices in Menlo Park, California.

Here are the gourmet perks currently afforded to the employees of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies.

Facebook has an on-site Philz Coffee.

The social media giant offers employees free unlimited food spanning healthy and guilty-pleasure options. Many of the on-campus cafeterias at the Menlo Park headquarters are more like specialized restaurants, from barbecue joints and burger shacks to smoothie stands and ice cream shops. There's even an outpost of the uber-hip Philz Coffee on campus.

As one Menlo Park employee on Glassdoor put it, the meal benefits have its upsides and downsides — "pros: free food; cons: got fat."

Employees at Facebook's new Mountain View offices won't have that problem. When the location opens this fall, free food won't be offered to employees there as part of a city restriction forbidding tech companies in the region from supplying fully subsidized meals to staff.

Apple employees don't get free food — but they do get subsidized cafes.

Apple is one of the tech giants that does not offer its employees free food (with the exception of free dinner for iOS or OS X team members) but there are multiple subsidized cafes.

The new "Spaceship" headquarters in Cupertino, California, has a cafe that's four stories high, with a massive glass door and the capacity for 4,000 hungry employees, according to a 2017 Wired profile.

The cafes subsidize everything except ingredient cost, and allow employees to pay using a payroll deduction plan. This means that although meals aren't, free employees are able to get a nice tax break.

The menu isn't too shabby either: Employees can have a custom-made burrito, salad, pasta, or pizza, and there's a juice bar that gives out ginger, cayenne pepper, and beat juice combo shots.

And though food isn't completely free like the company's tech neighbors, at least the apples are.