Tracking corporate cuisine: What’s on the menu for 2026?

As 2026 gets underway, we’re looking back on a standout year for Uber Eats at work. Throughout 2025, UK businesses and their employees leaned into food delivery in new ways. From healthy eating habits to a notable increase in in-office meals, the data from the past twelve months reveals several valuable key trends and insights; not only into how organisations are integrating Uber Eats into working life, but also into larger, UK work culture shifts.

This doesn’t just tell a success story for 2025; it also offers clear signals for how organisations can plan, invest, and adapt their workplace food strategies in 2026 and beyond.

Summer heat, higher eats

Summer 2025 was a standout period with Uber Eats orders surging across the season and July emerging as a particular high point. When compared to the rest of the year, Uber Eats orders went up from the monthly average by 25%, showing how warmer months drive a clear uplift in employee behaviour.

What this means for 2026

For employers, recognising that order volumes peak in summer can be a useful planning signal when thinking about how and when to highlight food-related benefits, stipends, or catering team moments.

Here’s what to keep in mind:

Time your investment: Prioritise food-related benefits, stipends, and catering moments around peak engagement periods such as late spring and summer.
Build flexible budgets: Design policies that can flex up in high‑demand months, rather than stretching a flat budget across the whole year.
Fuel connection days: Align food benefits with offsites, town halls, and collaboration days when people are already primed to come together.

Salads and bowls were the most chosen food options on Uber Eats

Throughout the year, the top three food choices were salads and bowls, Halal food options, and wings, with greens and nutrient-densed food ranking first. Looking beyond categories to individual choices, UK employees’ top 25 selected food items were predominantly from health-led brands, with approximately one in four orders being either a bowl or a salad.

While employers might fear that employees would opt for more unhealthy choices like fast food or burgers and fries, 2025’s data substantiates the fact that many UK employees actively choose lighter options.

What this means for 2026

These patterns suggest that when employees are given genuine choice, many will use it to support their own health and dietary preferences. For employers, it’s a useful reminder that food-related benefits don’t have to sit at odds with wellbeing strategies. They can actively support them by making healthier options easier to access, without imposing rigid rules.

Turn 2025’s healthy choices into a more strategic advantage:

Back your wellbeing agenda: Make Uber Eats vouchers part of your health and wellbeing toolkit, helping employees access nutritious meals that fit their lifestyles.
Curate for choice, not restriction: Highlight health‑led brands and menu options without imposing strict rules. Employees are already demonstrating they’ll often choose them.
Tie into health campaigns: Link food benefits to existing initiatives like wellbeing weeks, mental health campaigns, or fitness challenges for stronger engagement.

75%

increase in workplace food orders in 2025, underscoring the need to plan for higher in-office demand in 2026

Uber for Business Eats usage data, 2025

Top industries

The top industries for Uber Eats spend in 2025 were financial services, technology, and healthcare. Employees within these sectors accounted for a total of 50% of Eats spending throughout the year.

This concentration of spend suggests that in fast‑paced, competitive industries, food benefits are becoming a core part of how employers support busy teams and enhance the day‑to‑day work experience. For organisations in other sectors, it’s a useful signal that flexible, on‑demand food options are becoming an increasingly common expectation in workplaces where attracting and retaining top talent is a priority.

These sectors also tend to share characteristics like long or unpredictable hours, hybrid teams, and high-intensity project cycles, where convenient food options could help to reduce friction in the working day. As financial services, technology, and healthcare experiment with new workplace benefits like meals and meal vouchers through Uber Eats, their behaviour may provide some early signals about how expectations around employee support could similarly evolve in other industries over time.

What this means for 2026

Use these early‑adopter industries as a signal for what’s coming next:

Benchmark against high‑competition sectors: If you’re hiring in a tight talent market, assume flexible food benefits are shifting from ‘nice to have’ to expected.
Support critical teams first: Start with high‑pressure functions, like sales, engineering, operations, or frontline teams, where food can have an immediate impact on productivity and morale.
Treat food as infrastructure, not just a perk: Position Uber Eats as part of your everyday employee support model, especially for hybrid and always‑on teams.

Trends towards in-office working

Uber Eats orders in 2025 also pointed to an increased number of people returning to the office, with workplace orders rising by almost 75% between January and September. This is a trend that we can expect to see further continuing into 2026, as more and more people make their return into the office.

For employers, this sharp uptick in workplace orders suggests that food is once again becoming part of the in‑office experience, whether that’s supporting collaboration days, onboarding, or everyday office life. It also implies that as office occupancy grows, employees are looking for convenient, flexible options that fit around a more structured working day.

And it’s not just where people are ordering from that feeds this insight, but also when. Across 2025, orders consistently clustered around core mealtimes, rather than being used primarily for late‑night snacks or late dinners outside of working hours. This indicates that employees increasingly use Uber Eats to support their working day instead of to extend it.

What this means for 2026

As in‑office patterns continue to evolve, you can use 2025’s signals to guide your next moves:

Anchor office days with food: Use meals to make planned office days more attractive.
Match benefits to hybrid rhythms: Align food benefits with the specific days teams are in together, rather than spreading support across the week.

Turning insights into actions for 2026

Looking at how Uber Eats was used by employees and organisations in 2025 fuels plenty of valuable insights into both the workplace at large and how you can better use Eats going into 2026.

Here are the key takeaways:

Promote healthy eating and wellbeing: Supply employees with Uber Eats vouchers and highlight health‑led brands to make nutritious meals more accessible, reinforcing your organisation’s wellbeing agenda.
Plan smarter, not bigger, budgets: If year‑round food benefits aren’t feasible, concentrate investment in high‑impact periods like the summer months or key company events, when engagement is naturally higher.
Design benefits around how people actually work: Use what 2025 showed—more in‑office time, hybrid rhythms, and mealtime‑focused ordering—to shape policies that feel relevant and easy for employees to use.

Hungry to turn 2025’s momentum into a stronger workplace experience in 2026? Get started with Uber for Business today and fuel your teams with flexible, on‑demand meals that meet them where, and how, they work.