COMPARISON4 min read
Meal vouchers or an operated canteen: the comparison without spin
Vouchers are simpler and carry zero operational risk for you. An operated canteen transfers that risk to the provider and returns two things vouchers structurally cannot: data on what your people actually eat, and the ability to act on health and absenteeism indicators.
The honest part first
If your objective is to deliver a benefit and nothing else, vouchers solve it. They require no operation, no supervision and no site, the tax treatment is the same, and no supplier can fail you at noon because there is no service to fail.
We say this plainly because the opposite argument — that vouchers are always worse — is what an operator is expected to say, and it is not true.
Where the difference actually is
The difference is not tax treatment: both models sit under the same article 387-1 limits. It is what each one can do afterwards.
- Data: with vouchers the money is spent wherever the employee decides and nobody measures what was eaten. A canteen produces participation and consumption data per employee.
- Intervention: you cannot change a menu you do not operate. Absenteeism, climate and turnover programmes need something to act on.
- Sanitary control: what your people eat on a voucher is outside your control; what is served in your canteen is inside it, and auditable.
- Time: a canteen on site returns the commute and queue time an external lunch consumes, which in shift operations is a production variable.
How to decide in one question
Ask what you would report at the end of the year. If the answer is the number of people who received the benefit, vouchers are enough and cheaper to administer. If the answer has to be an indicator that moved, vouchers have no mechanism to move it and a canteen does — provided the operator actually measures and reports, which most do not.
NoteIf you go the canteen route, make the monthly report a contractual deliverable with a date, not a courtesy. A canteen without measurement gives you the operational risk of a canteen and the data of a voucher: the worst of both.