What will lure Biotech companies to MoCo? Local Food!
Lunch at Facebook
How do top companies lure the best talent? Really good food. NPR recently reported on the inner workings of both Google and Facebook, where the country’s best chefs have been leaving top restaurants to work in the corporate cafeterias. The conditions are a bit different from the restaurant world, employees can eat all three meals a day, free of charge. Josef Desimone had a successful career in San Fransisco’s restaurant scene when he got the recruiting call from Google’s home office. He turned the job down at first, thinking it meant repeated menus created with sub-standard canned ingredients. He was wrong, “And when I went to Google, it was nothing like that,” he says. “It was completely the opposite: It was all free-range; it was all organic. It was everything that the restaurant I was working at couldn’t afford to be.” Desimone’s title is now “Culinary Overlord” at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto where he serves 1,300 lunches a day made from the freshest ingredients, and never repeats a menu.
Offering excellent food has proved to be an important tool in hiring and keeping great talent. “”Google offered food — all of a sudden, they were the engineering mecca. Facebook offered food and, all the sudden, same thing. You know, they become the engineering mecca,” Desimone says. “There’s a reason for that. … It’s a great recruiting tool.”
local eggs, the breakfast of biotech champions!
How does this amusing story about California relate to Montgomery County? The forces pushing the Gaithersburg West “Science City” plan for Belward Farm invoke the names of technology hub cities, like Palo Alto and Raleigh/Durham’s Research Triangle, to try to sell the surrounding communities on the proposed development. However, the top Palo Alto companies get an edge by giving their employees fresh, organic food. Closer to home, just north of the proposed Gaithersburg West Development lies a source of this secret recruitment tool, it is called the Ag Reserve, where mostly family-run, small and mid-scale farms contribute $33 Million to the County economy by harvesting table crops and livestock. Should the project be built and should the top Biotech companies choose to locate there, a partnership between companies eager to hire and keep top talent by feeding them well, and Ag Reserve farmers, hoping to find increased markets for thier harvest, would benefit all involved.
However, the Science City plan as currently written threatens to irrevocably damage the Reserve’s farms. The sheer size and density of the project, comparable to 4 1/2 Pentagons, will require the construction of 8 lane highways to handle the traffic produced by adding 40,000 new employees to the site. The strain on the Reserve from traffic and housing development will make it financially impossible for farmers to continue farming. The prospect of fresh local food for the entire region (including hungry workers) will dim.
This is one more illustration of why the Gaithersburg West project must be scaled back. The cities that have sucessfuly lured cutting edge buisnesses have done so by offering good quality of life to the prospective employees, and striking a balance between development and open space.
The County Council and others supporting the plan seem to think, “if we build it they will come,” but we say “if we have farm land left to feed them, and open space left for them to recreate in, they will come.” The top talent in Palo Alto would agree.
For more information on the Gaithersburg West Plan, please visit: