Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired about 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credits to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses.
The tech firm, which is worth £1.2tn and also owns the messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have dismissed workers last week after an investigation discovered staff had been abusing the system, including sending food home when they were not in the office.
That included one unnamed worker on a $400,000 salary, who said they had used their meal credits to buy household goods and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.
On the anonymous messaging platform Blind, they wrote: “On days where I would not be eating at the office, like if my husband was cooking or if I was grabbing dinner with friends, I figured I ought not to waste the dinner credit.”
The worker admitted the breach when approached as part of a human resources investigation into the practice and was later fired. “It was almost surreal that this was happening,” the person wrote, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the story.
Some employees were also found to have spent the credits on other household items, such as acne pads. Employees who had only occasionally broken the rules were reprimanded, but were able to keep their jobs, the newspaper reported.
Free food has long been one of the perks of working for large tech companies.
Meta, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, usually feeds staff for free from canteens at its larger offices, including its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters.
But those at smaller sites are given daily credits to order food though delivery services such as UberEats and Grubhub. Daily allowances include $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner.
In 2022, the company caused a staff uproar after it decided to delay its daily free dinner service at its Silicon Valley campus by half an hour to 6.30pm, as part of wider cuts. It meant fewer employees would eat on campus if they managed to catch the last shuttle leaving the site at 6pm. It also made it more difficult for employees to stock up on free food to bring home as leftovers.
Other big tech companies have also been cracking down on employee perks. Google started to cut back on fitness classes and the frequency of laptop replacements last year. The company had also reportedly become more stringent on office supplies including staplers and tape, with staff having to borrow items from their reception desks instead.
after newsletter promotion
Meta’s decision to fire staff it accuses of abusing their perks last week came as its bosses launched a fresh restructuring plan that meant laying off and relocating staff from its WhatsApp and Instagram divisions and its augmented reality arm, Reality Labs.
The company has just emerged from large-scale job cuts, with Zuckerberg having ordered 21,000 redundancies in 2022 and 2023. Meta had about 70,799 staff at the end of June this year.
Meta has been contacted for comment.