How Many Snacks Does a Small Office Actually Need?

By Claude Burns
4 min read

Somebody on your team just asked "how many snacks should we order?" and the honest answer most people give is "uh, a lot?" That is how you end up with 48 bags of pretzels and a drawer full of granola bars nobody claims. Here is the actual math, the way we do it for offices every day.

Short answer: plan on about 12 to 15 snacks per person per month for a normal office schedule. A 10 to 12 person office goes through roughly 150 snacks a month. Double it for 25 people, triple it for 35. Remote-heavy teams need less; a sales floor needs more.

Table of Contents

The per-person math

Most people in an office eat one snack on a typical in-office day. Some eat two, some eat none, and one person eats four (you know who). Across a whole team it averages out close to one per person per day, so the working formula is:

people in the office × days in the office per month ≈ snacks per month

A 12-person team that is in three days a week is about 12 × 13 = 156 snacks a month. That is why a 150-snack box lands right for teams that size. It is not a magic number, it is just what the math comes out to for a small office on a hybrid schedule.

If your team is in five days a week, the same 12 people are closer to 12 × 21 = 250. Round up to two boxes, or one box plus whatever people bring in.

By team size: 5, 10, 25, 50

Using roughly 13 in-office days a month (three days a week), here is where the numbers land:

  • 5 people: about 65 snacks a month. One 150-snack box lasts two months, or you keep the box and pick more of the stuff people fight over.
  • 10 to 12 people: about 130 to 160 snacks. One box a month.
  • 25 people: about 325 snacks. Two boxes, and it is worth building them differently so the kitchen doesn't look identical every month.
  • 50 people: about 650 snacks. Four boxes a month. At this size, you also start to care about restock timing more than quantity (more on that below).

Our own rule of thumb, which we put on the box page: one box per 10 to 12 people per month. It has held up across a lot of offices.

What changes the number

Four things move it more than anything else:

  • Days in the office. The biggest lever by far. A fully remote team with a monthly onsite needs a fraction of what a five-day team does.
  • Whether you serve lunch. Offices that cater lunch eat fewer snacks, but they eat them at 3:30 pm like clockwork. You need fewer total snacks and more of the afternoon kind (salty, crunchy).
  • Visitors. A practice with a waiting room, a showroom, a coworking space with day passes. Every visitor is a potential snack, and they don't show up in your headcount.
  • The one person. Every office has someone who treats the snack shelf as a meal plan. Do not size for them, but do accept that 10% of your snacks are going to one desk.

How many kinds of snacks (not just how many snacks)

Quantity is the easy part. Variety is where offices actually go wrong. Twenty bags of one thing gets ignored after week one, even if it was popular in week one. A good month for a 12-person team looks like 15 different snacks, 10 of each. Something salty, something sweet, a couple of protein options, a few that are gluten-free or vegan for the people who need them, and at least one thing nobody has tried.

That variety is why we ship 150 snacks as 15 kinds rather than 150 of the same bag, and why you can swap any of them out before the next box ships. What got eaten in week one tells you what to order more of. What is still sitting there on the 25th tells you what to drop.

How to tell you ordered too many

Two signs. First, the shelf still looks full on the 20th. Second, people start taking snacks home "so they don't go to waste," which is a kind way of saying the office is now a pantry. Either way, drop a tier or stretch the box across two months. Too few is easier to spot: the shelf is empty by the 18th and somebody is doing an emergency Costco run, which is the exact thing a snack program is supposed to end.

If you want to sanity check your number against a real office, the how it works page walks through the sizing we use.

Quick answers

How many snacks per employee per month? About 12 to 15 for a hybrid schedule, closer to 20 for a five-day office.

How many snacks for a 10-person office? Around 130 to 150 a month. One 150-snack box.

How many for 20 people? Around 260 to 300. Two boxes.

Should I buy in bulk instead? Bulk works for quantity and fails on variety. You get 48 of one thing. See why subscriptions beat buying in bulk for the full comparison.

Do snacks go stale before we finish a box? Not at these quantities. Individually wrapped snacks have months of shelf life; a box sized to your team is gone in four weeks.