If you’ve noticed low productivity among your staff, your employees’ diets may be the cause.
In this article, you’ll learn why you should give your employees healthy, farm-to-table food to help with productivity.
Many studies show that diet and productivity are linked.
In fact, a 2017 study showed that employees who ate more fruits and veggies were 20% more productive.
The same study also showed employees who ate healthier were absent 27% less often.
It’s not the only study to show how important healthy food is to productivity.
A 2015 study showed that eating more fruits and veggies led to “greater flourishing in daily life.”
The study found that people who ate more produce were happier and more creative.
Plus, eating unhealthy food actually has a negative effect on productivity.
A 2012 study found that unhealthy diets led to a 66% chance of lowered productivity.
The study’s lead author said 77% of all loss of productivity relates to health.
This costs the company two to three times more than annual health care expenses.
As you can see, giving your employees healthy food helps their productivity stay high!
Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers preventing employees from eating healthy diets during the work week.
Speed, convenience and affordability are three of those barriers.
Food breaks down into glucose when it’s eaten.
Glucose is what fuels our bodies. Too much or too little leaves us unfocused, low on energy and with low brain performance.
Unhealthy food typically turns in to glucose quickly, giving us a short burst of energy.
On the other hand, healthy food breaks into glucose at a steadier rate, giving us a long flow of energy.
By the time lunch rolls around, employees typically haven’t eaten in hours.
This means they’re low on energy and hungry, making them more likely to pick the most convenient and quickest option.
If the employees don’t have easy, fast and affordable access to healthy food, like fruits and vegetables, they’re going to eat unhealthy food.
As you learned earlier, this costs your company a lot of productivity.
Luckily, you can help your employees eat healthy food and help productivity as a result.
To do so, you should provide fresh produce onsite.
This can be in the office kitchen, or through an employee café, or cafeteria.
You can’t get any more convenient than that.
Plus, if you offer the food for free or cheap, they’ll be even less likely to choose something unhealthy.
Better yet, if the produce is grown onsite, it’ll save you money because you won’t have to buy it.
Plus, farm-to-table produce is even healthier than purchased produce.
This is because packaged produce is harvested earlier than farm-to-table food.
Fruits and vegetables that are harvested earlier aren’t given enough time to mature, so they have less nutrients.
Growing your company’s own food also means less goes to waste, since it’s harvested as needed.
One of the best ways to start a farm on your corporate campus is a container farm.
Container farms are great because they’re inside of a repurposed shipping container.
This means you can start a farm without farmland and in urban areas!
Plus, they use no soil and 90% less water per vegetable than traditional farms.
And a container farm from Pure Greens comes turnkey, so you won’t have to do any construction of your own.
A container farm is also automated and controlled with a smartphone app, so it doesn’t need full-time work.
Best of all, it yields a lot!
One container farm yields up to 400 pounds of produce each month, depending on the crop.
As you can see, using a container farm to grow food for your company will help your employees eat healthier, improving their productivity at work.
To learn more about what it takes to run a container farm, check out our full guide.
And make sure to give us a call at 602-753-3469 or visit our website to find out how your company can get started!
