Thank God SOMEbody's thinking of the bottom line...

We have meetings at the corporate office quite often. It's not uncommon for there to be anywhere from eight to thirty people from out of town (sometimes out of the country) descending upon our office for a large meeting. It's also not uncommon for all these people to meet during working lunches.

We also have a kitchen at the corporate office. It's our test kitchen, so it's essentially a scaled-down version of a restaurant kitchen. It's a fantastic place, and I was known to occasionally haunt it in search of vanilla ice cream when I was pregnant.

We also have vendors who like to give us samples of stuff, vendors who also offer competitive pricing on raw goods (which we tend to keep in stock, anyway). And we have two executive chefs who, well, cook.

So, given the economic climate, I was quite happy to see the post-meeting-leftovers spread in the break room, all courtesy of our very own kitchen.

Normally, the catering for meetings like these have been outsourced to Panera or Ruby Tuesday or some other chain. I always thought that was kind of silly since, as a restaurant chain, we offer catering ourselves (complete with a fancy truck).

But, again, the times are a-changing, and, well, it was just so nice to see that someone is looking at the bottom line and keeping the food in-house.

Now if only we could do something about curbing travel expenses...