Trump tax law quietly takes aim at popular perk: office snacks

The SkinnyPop in the break room may not last. Donald Trump is targeting the office snack.

The president’s signature tax law allows a long-standing business deduction for the cost of food provided to employees to expire, imperiling a workplace perk popularized during Silicon Valley’s dot-com boom that is now an emblem of modern office culture. A well-stocked pantry is now a staple at Wall Street banks, among other places.

U.S. companies that continue to provide office snacks, coffee or on-site lunches will see them taxed after Dec. 31, when the deduction will be eliminated.

The tax change gained little attention as the sprawling, nearly 1,000-page legislation moved through Congress and it isn’t yet clear how companies will respond.

A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which provides employees $30 stipends for “out of hours” meals and a pantry stocked with complementary coffee and snacks, declined to comment on what the company will do when the tax deduction ends. So did a spokesperson for Meta Platforms Inc., another company known for employees’ ready access to free food and coffee. Spokespeople for Alphabet Inc.’s Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Far from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Alaska’s fishing industry was spared from higher-cost noshes. The state’s fishermen earned a carve-out in a bid to keep Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s support for the overall bill, which squeaked by only with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote. 

No such luck for Maine’s lobstermen, whose senator, Republican Susan Collins, didn’t vote for the legislation.

Restaurants will also be able to deduct the cost of employee meals, a long-standing tradition for kitchen and wait staff. But that will no longer be the case for most other employers, including factories and hospitals, many of which also offer workers free or subsidized meals or snacks.

Eliminating the deduction is projected to raise $32 billion in additional taxes on employers through 2034, according to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.

Free food has become broadly entrenched in workplaces, with 44% of U.S. employers now providing free snacks, double the rate a decade ago, according to surveys conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management..

Free office pantries and cafes have been celebrated in recent decades for encouraging employees to work longer hours, boosting morale and sparking creative collaboration through chance encounters. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has been widely quoted as instructing his office designers to assure no employee was more than 200 feet away from food.

Trump’s 2017 tax law halved the deduction for employer-provided food and scheduled it for elimination at the end of this year, as the administration sought to lower that law’s budget impact when a host of breaks expired Dec. 31. The new tax legislation Trump signed on July 4 rolled back most of the year-end scheduled tax increases but maintained elimination of office snack-deduction, except for the Alaska and restaurant carveouts.

Still, Ali Sabeti, chief executive officer of ZeroCater Inc., a San Francisco-based corporate catering company whose more than 1,000 clients include major banks and tech companies such as Roku Inc. — said he doesn’t expect to lose business as a result. 

The catering company didn’t lose clients in 2017, when the deduction was reduced to 50%, he said.

“It’s pretty inelastic,” Sabeti said. “When you take a tax deduction away, the cost is going to go up, but companies will continue to spend, just like if you took away a deduction on a laptop.”