Lunchtimes are an often underrated period in our working lives.  Keith Ferrazzi famously said that you should never dine alone, and there have been a number of apps designed to help you find interesting colleagues to eat with, whether it’s Lunch Roulette or Spark.

Indeed, Lunchcruit took this ‘lunch as networking’ concept a step further and matched up talent with organizations in a no pressure environment to see if a potential career move could be engineered.

To help the process, startups such as Allset aim to reduce the idle time wasted during lunch times.  Users can select the food they want from particular restaurants, and are then given a time by which the meal will be ready, so you turn up and eat straight away.

Eating well

If you want to eat better whilst on work premises however, then maybe Forkable will be to your tastes.  They provide an AI engine that can take your dietary preferences and create an order to meet your tastes.  Impressively, they claim they can do this for groups of employees so you can each receive a meal you want and eat collectively together.

The app features a number of payment options, whether it’s employees footing the whole bill, the employer, or a combination of the two.

I wrote last year about the crucial role eating together can play in forging good team spirit. Research found that employees that ate meals together had significantly better performance at work than their peers who preferred to eat alone.

“Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills back over into work,” the authors say. “From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today’s workplaces.”

Maybe Forkable, and other apps like it will play an increasingly important role in facilitating this.