Chewse's selling point is building office community through family-style meal programs, and espouses values like love, candor/openness and personal growth . Unfortunately, my experience at Chewse (and I believe that of many others' - past and present) was not one of alignment with the mission or these values.
Chewse does not have much of a product. They work with some amazing restaurants, but they are constantly being jerked around by cost savings initiatives from the top. Vendors sign on with the promise of growing their business, often being wooed, even pressured by salespeople with rose-colored glasses on the vendor experience, end up facing wildly variable order volumes and constant contract renegotiations with the goal of lower prices. If they don't agree to the lower prices, they will see drastically fewer orders. Almost a bait and switch. That's no way for a "love" company to treat their valuable partners, who are, of course, the entire supply-side of the business. Vendors who do stay on board deliver sometimes tasty, often lukewarm, leaky dishes in dozens of aluminum trays (HORRIBLE for the environment...duh) to hordes of engineers and other techbros who can probably afford to eat at Gary Danko everyday anyway. Many go back to their desk to eat, despite our "community-building" focus. I didn't feel fulfilled with my work ultimately just feeding this already lucky, overwhelmingly wealthy population.
Chewse claims to support their employees personal growth offering a professional development stipend, and calling this out in top company values. However, my experience contrasted sharply with this. Some leaders warmed me up with things like "you can do anything you want here!" while others, with whom I met in a bout of frustration in my then-current role told me to simply check the job boards for anything interesting. Confusing...! My initiative in making process improvements, taking on new responsibilities, showing deep and genuine concern and action for the health of the company was NEVER rewarded with a raise, promotion, title change, etc. save for regular yearly re-benchmarking. Many of the mid-level managers at Chewse have formed a friend-clique and posses a great deal of influence on the career trajectories of those below them. If you are not "in" with this crew, good luck getting anywhere. Senior leadership seems content coasting on their ~$200k salaries, not really leading or seemingly caring too much about the success of Chewse, and leaving it mostly in the hands of the clique,
Chewse engages in cringe-worthy cultural activities which include group hugs, weekly praise-giving sessions, and forcing the entire company to watch the CEO interview a senior leader. These events support my evaluation that Chewse is VERY quick to celebrate success, but rarely, if ever, recognizes failure. I seriously don't think I heard a senior leader or mid-level clique member ONCE admit fault or something they could've done better. The blame, extra work, etc. always falls on the low level peons. For a company that espouses candor and personal growth, this is just strange and inconsistent.
In my final few months, my team received a new manager from inside. While they had two months to facilitate this transition, we may have spent a total of 10 minutes with our new manager before they arrived for their first day, knowing shockingly little about how our jobs actually worked, despite being invited to and RSVP'ing "yes" to our biweekly meetings. Recent new hires to our team had absolutely NO training plan, and were simply plopped down next to us on their and within their first week, left to their own devices and question-asking. The lack of support for them was simply stunning.
Overall, Chewse is attractive for a potential employee, with heart-warming values and a fun-sounding business model. Unfortunately, I observed nearly none of this in practice.
