6 ms·

Lunch, disrupted: ZeroCater helps startups get fed

115 points by arram 15y ago

kennystone 15y ago
> On the vendor side, working with ZeroCater means regular business for a number of food service operators... In exchange for volume discounts, ZeroCater provides a steady stream of orders for a number of local businesses. This is so cool. Running a restaurant is extremely difficult and the margins are low. ZeroCater is helping them operate a different kind of business in an efficient way (like catering but with way less overhead and sales).
- guiseppecalzone 15y ago
  It's really amazing to see how Arram is transforming the local restaurant economy. I've gone out and talked to restaurants that work with ZeroCater. ZeroCater has become a significant source of revenue for many of these small businesses.
billybob 15y ago
Is this just an illustration of the difference between a "startup" and a "new business"? If I started a business, I'd probably use a home office or crappy cheap rented space, pack a sandwich, etc, and wait until I had enough revenue to do nicer things. Seems like startups are about getting and burning money from Day 1, hoping to take off but maybe crashing.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- lsb 15y ago
  ZeroCater's minimum order size is 10, if I recall. Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
    Not to mention that it's a really nice perk that people talk about positively. It can be basically cheap PR. Free lunch may not be a reason to work somewhere, but it's something that current employees will mention and anything that gets them to paint your business in a positive light is worth something.
  - timr 15y ago
    "Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area." It is, and it isn't. I might be an oddball, but I prefer to get away from the office for an hour a day. It's become conventional wisdom in the valley echo chamber that catered lunch is a "productivity win", but there's a lot to be said for the change in perspective that getting out of the office provides. When I go out for lunch, I feel more relaxed, more creative, and calmer about my work. And don't forget -- just because I'm sitting around a table eating with my co-workers does not mean that I'm talking about work (in fact, I suspect it's a net-neutral benefit, if you're only looking at worker productivity). Last, but not least, there's a health component: carry-out for lunch, every day, is a good way to kill yourself. My cholesterol levels (and body weight) shot up dramatically when I was eating take-out on a daily basis. Google cafeterias serve healthy food; cheap restaurant food doesn't measure up. Once I went back to finding my own lunch, my cholesterol levels dropped back to normal.
- samstave 15y ago
  >"* Seems like startups are about getting and burning money from Day 1, hoping to take off but maybe crashing.*" WELCOME TO THE SILICON VALLEY CASINO! Where you, yes YOU TOO, can become a beeelionaaire!!! Step right up and sign here! --- Seriously, not sure if you were here the first go round, but thats exactly what the first bubble was like. However now we have concepts like lean startups and the fund-them-young-and-hungry model of today. But look at startups like Color.com got 40+MM without so much as user validation.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Two things: 1) The cost of good engineers in the Bay Area is ridiculous. Bringing lunch in, say, once a week, will be less than a 1% difference in your compensation budget. And you are competing with places like Google which have free awesome food daily. 2) People are not robots. In theory, it should make no difference who orders or pays for food. In practice, it's swell to just have something tasty show up so that everybody can have lunch together with no hassle.
lewisgodowski 15y ago
Sounds like a great idea, I would just be worried about getting sucked into the habit of having them cater everyday, and end up blowing more money than I could afford. Regardless, it's great seeing problems like this solved (:
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > I would just be worried about getting sucked into the habit of having them cater everyday, It was quite common to have this service during the internet bubble. Some folks put on a pound per month. Also, there were similar services for keeping refrigerators stocked, soda machines, etc.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    My employer gives breakfast, fruit, lunch and cake + free coffee, coke and tea everyday. Most of the new people allegedly take an quite a few pounds.
    - Splines 15y ago
      Yup. Especially since you transition away from an active lifestyle of walking/biking everywhere for classes.
- aschobel 15y ago
  Time vs Money Not worrying about what to get the team for lunch is a huge time saver. It gives us more time to spend on users. Disclaimer, we use ZeroCater twice a week and absolutely love them.
  - edwinnathaniel 15y ago
    For those that don't have Office Manager probably? :D
- arram 15y ago
  Google and Facebook don't feed their employees because they're naive. At a $65k salary, the meal is fully paid for if you can save employees 20 minutes by having it brought in.
stdbrouw 15y ago
"dealing with catering was a huge pain for everyone who handle such things" Here you have it folks, catering isn't just a little inconvenient or cumbersome at times, it's a HUGE PAIN.
ABS 15y ago
very nice but I don't see the disruption, at all. In fact I'm getting really tired of all the startups who call themselves disruptive, 99% of them aren't (and I'd argue you are disruptive when others call you so, not when you do it yourself)
- twentysix 15y ago
  They are doing something similar to the Dabbawalas but with restaurant food replacing home cooked food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala You are right, I wouldnt call it disruptive either, but it is a very useful service. (and I'd argue you are disruptive when others call you so, not when you do it yourself) That applies to the word "Hacker" too.
thejteam 15y ago
The best way to profit from the gold rush is to sell shovels and pickaxes. Reminds me of the story of a saloon during the original California gold rush that would sell a bowl of soup for an astronomical sum. The people who stuck it rich would buy it so they could brag about how much they paid for a bowl of soup. Not sure how true it is, but believable.
- arram 15y ago
  Actually, our customers aren't just funded startups. We've got accounting firms, consumer electronics companies, design firms, law firms, media companies, telecoms, etc.
- patja 15y ago
  a bowel of soup? no thanks!
  - dctoedt 15y ago
    Sort of like haggis [1], right? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis
- theorique 15y ago
  Reminds me of a joke about Russian oligarchs in the late 90s (when Communism collapsed, a lot of state industries were privatized, and a lot of people got rich very quickly and messily). Two 'new money' Russians are riding in a limousine in Moscow, and one says to the other "You know, I paid $1000 for this tie". The other guy says, "Idiot! I know a shop where you can get that tie for $2000!"
pessimist 15y ago
I wouldnt classify this as a disruption - more like a useful middleman.
- simon_weber 15y ago
  What do you see as the difference between the two? Or, put another way, what do you see as the requirements for a disruption? I don't see any reason why a middleman that's doing something innovative shouldn't be considered a disruption.
  - vangale 15y ago
    I see "disruption" as either removing middlemen (disrupting supply chain) or changing consumer expectations in a market. Adding a middleman in the supply chain isn't disruption so much as making it more efficient for producers to reach consumers.
  - pessimist 15y ago
    Agree with vangale, also a disruption is something that would likely cause an entire set of jobs/companies to be irrelevant, I don't see that here.
  - dkrich 15y ago
    If you go by the Clayton Christensen definition, a disruptive company is basically one that starts off selling a product that is inferior to the accepted standard along most dimensions, but not all (usually it is much cheaper). Eventually the dimensions that were previously considered important erode or become altogether irrelevant, and suddenly the company focused on the lower-end segment finds itself in a position of dominance, while the former heavyweights are playing catchup. I agree that it is an often overused term and one which is too often used to describe innovative business models or small startups. I don't see how it applies here. That said, a business certainly does not need to be disruptive to be successful. Disruptive companies are extremely rare and only come along once in a while. I once had a professor who said that a great way to spot the potential for a disruptive product is to look for situations where you find yourself using a hybrid model- that is you use two or more solutions to solve a single problem. One meets a single need but not enough to replace the others.
yabbadabbadoo 15y ago
ZeroCater’s next market has yet to be determined Pls let it be New York City. We'd love to sign up.
encoderer 15y ago
We use Waiter.com's "virtual cafeteria service" here (a social startup in SOMA). Basically, every day they pick a restaurant. I place my order off the menu. It gets delivered w/ my name on it. Works fantastic.
starfox 15y ago
Too bad http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ isn't out of closed beta yet.
btipling 15y ago
I appreciate all the work ZeroCater is doing to create a better catering experience. We use ZeroCater at our SF Rackspace office. Their customer service is very responsive. The website is great. My biggest complaint is how variable the food quality is. Sometimes it is pretty bad, in which case you can rank the quality low and leave a comment and ZeroCater will get back with you, which is great. Also variable is the labeling. I'm a vegetarian, often I have to play the guessing game of "is that meat or not?" Just last week I bit into a meat filled burrito that was in a bagged marked as 'vegan'. So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great.
- larrys 15y ago
  "So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great." Their product is food. That's the important thing. All the CS and effort in the world is meaningless without the food quality being better than just acceptable and certainly not "pretty bad". In the non-startup world a restaurant serving bad food would only survive on a toll road rest stop or where there are no other alternatives.
- binaryborealis 15y ago
  Hey, this is Yoshi over at ZC. I handle the Rackspace account. I'm very sorry to say this is the first I've heard of your burrito incident, and I'm amazed that you don't sound more upset about it. Would you mind dropping me an email at hello@zerocater.com? I'd like to discuss how we can make it up to you. Thanks!
  - larrys 15y ago
    "and I'm amazed that you don't sound more upset about it." ZC is a YC company. He's probably afraid of the downvotes if he doesn't keep up the crowd fawning going on here.
    - binaryborealis 15y ago
      :( That's a terrible reason to keep quiet about something this serious, though.
brezina 15y ago
Both of my companies www.sincerely.com & www.xobni.com are ZeroCater customers. The quality and diversity of the food we get is better with ZeroCater than when we ordered it ourselves. Also, the vendors show up on time. They know if we complain they won't just lose 1 customer - they may lose all of ZeroCater. Arram has found a true market need. His story of hustle is inspiring. I'm so genuinely excited by this perfect story of entrepreneurship. And I wish I would have invested.
- philippb 15y ago
  I lived together with Arram when he had 6 customers and did it with his mobile phone and a Excel spreadsheet by himself. I have to agree with what you say. A very inspiring story!
  - arram 15y ago
    The AirBnB connection. :) Thanks Philip.
- tikhon 15y ago
  both of mine (parse.com and scribd.com) are also zerocater customers :-)
larrys 15y ago
Expanding ZeroCater will involve solving tremendous quality and logistical problems when attempted in the real world at "typical" companies. At the risk of sounding like the person who predicted the need for only 100 computers worldwide (or whatever that small number was) I don't see how this idea can be expanded to offer a similar service in the legacy corporate world where companies are not trying to be "mommy" to their workers to squeeze out ounces of extra productivity. Food service is really hard even if you operate the food service place and the people come to you. Here you are maintaining quality among multiple food places with many chances for things to get screwed up. Additionally the typical workplace is not filled with a young forgiving workforce.
- eitally 15y ago
  I disagree. As an employee in the legacy corporate world who has to suffer through crap every time lunch or dinner is catered in for a meeting, I would welcome healthier, better, more consistent options. I don't see many big businesses setting up daily deliveries en mass, but even if it was just weekly or at the group or departmental level, I can see a significant market for ZC.
  - larrys 15y ago
    I am not saying that there isn't a market for what they do. I am saying that maintaining quality with this is extremely difficult. You are dealing with food service and rag tag food service at that. Having owned (non food service companies) that employ the type of workers that are essentially the same as in food service with an equivalent amount of variables (that can go wrong because of human error) it is my feeling that this is difficult to scale. And while it is true that zero cater will be an important customer to any of their vendors, they don't have control over hiring and food quality as well as other things that will impact their customer base. And they can't just switch to a supplier in another state. They are limited by the existing suppliers in their market. Now of course if they want to operate the food suppliers (with their own canteen) that would give them the control they need. But that is an entirely different business.
dmragone 15y ago
It might seem like a productivity win, but it may also be a creativity loss. A recent book by Jonah Lehrer http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0547386079/theeconomists-20 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0547386079/theeconomi... (I found out about it via The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21550235 http://www.economist.com/node/21550235) describes how creativity is most likely to happen at times of calm relaxation, such as a relaxed warm shower or a casual walk. There are times when I eat lunch at my desk to get more done, but I have found a casual stroll and lunch outside to be well worth the time and mental state it provides for thinking and creating.
- aquark 15y ago
  Often the most productive hour of my day design-wise is the hour long run at lunchtime. Not only that it makes the afternoon far more productive too as I am much more awake than if I skip it.

115 points by arram 15y ago

> On the vendor side, working with ZeroCater means regular business for a number of food service operators... In exchange for volume discounts, ZeroCater provides a steady stream of orders for a number of local businesses. This is so cool. Running a restaurant is extremely difficult and the margins are low. ZeroCater is helping them operate a different kind of business in an efficient way (like catering but with way less overhead and sales).

guiseppecalzone 15y ago
It's really amazing to see how Arram is transforming the local restaurant economy. I've gone out and talked to restaurants that work with ZeroCater. ZeroCater has become a significant source of revenue for many of these small businesses.

billybob 15y ago

Is this just an illustration of the difference between a "startup" and a "new business"? If I started a business, I'd probably use a home office or crappy cheap rented space, pack a sandwich, etc, and wait until I had enough revenue to do nicer things. Seems like startups are about getting and burning money from Day 1, hoping to take off but maybe crashing.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
lsb 15y ago
ZeroCater's minimum order size is 10, if I recall. Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
  Not to mention that it's a really nice perk that people talk about positively. It can be basically cheap PR. Free lunch may not be a reason to work somewhere, but it's something that current employees will mention and anything that gets them to paint your business in a positive light is worth something.
- timr 15y ago
  "Imagine you could get an extra half-hour of productive conversations out of people for ten bucks each. That's paying people $20/hr! What a good deal for engineers in the Bay Area." It is, and it isn't. I might be an oddball, but I prefer to get away from the office for an hour a day. It's become conventional wisdom in the valley echo chamber that catered lunch is a "productivity win", but there's a lot to be said for the change in perspective that getting out of the office provides. When I go out for lunch, I feel more relaxed, more creative, and calmer about my work. And don't forget -- just because I'm sitting around a table eating with my co-workers does not mean that I'm talking about work (in fact, I suspect it's a net-neutral benefit, if you're only looking at worker productivity). Last, but not least, there's a health component: carry-out for lunch, every day, is a good way to kill yourself. My cholesterol levels (and body weight) shot up dramatically when I was eating take-out on a daily basis. Google cafeterias serve healthy food; cheap restaurant food doesn't measure up. Once I went back to finding my own lunch, my cholesterol levels dropped back to normal.
samstave 15y ago
>"* Seems like startups are about getting and burning money from Day 1, hoping to take off but maybe crashing.*" WELCOME TO THE SILICON VALLEY CASINO! Where you, yes YOU TOO, can become a beeelionaaire!!! Step right up and sign here! --- Seriously, not sure if you were here the first go round, but thats exactly what the first bubble was like. However now we have concepts like lean startups and the fund-them-young-and-hungry model of today. But look at startups like Color.com got 40+MM without so much as user validation.
wpietri 15y ago
Two things: 1) The cost of good engineers in the Bay Area is ridiculous. Bringing lunch in, say, once a week, will be less than a 1% difference in your compensation budget. And you are competing with places like Google which have free awesome food daily. 2) People are not robots. In theory, it should make no difference who orders or pays for food. In practice, it's swell to just have something tasty show up so that everybody can have lunch together with no hassle.

lewisgodowski 15y ago

Sounds like a great idea, I would just be worried about getting sucked into the habit of having them cater everyday, and end up blowing more money than I could afford. Regardless, it's great seeing problems like this solved (:

jpdoctor 15y ago
> I would just be worried about getting sucked into the habit of having them cater everyday, It was quite common to have this service during the internet bubble. Some folks put on a pound per month. Also, there were similar services for keeping refrigerators stocked, soda machines, etc.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  My employer gives breakfast, fruit, lunch and cake + free coffee, coke and tea everyday. Most of the new people allegedly take an quite a few pounds.
  - Splines 15y ago
    Yup. Especially since you transition away from an active lifestyle of walking/biking everywhere for classes.
aschobel 15y ago
Time vs Money Not worrying about what to get the team for lunch is a huge time saver. It gives us more time to spend on users. Disclaimer, we use ZeroCater twice a week and absolutely love them.
- edwinnathaniel 15y ago
  For those that don't have Office Manager probably? :D
arram 15y ago
Google and Facebook don't feed their employees because they're naive. At a $65k salary, the meal is fully paid for if you can save employees 20 minutes by having it brought in.

stdbrouw 15y ago

"dealing with catering was a huge pain for everyone who handle such things" Here you have it folks, catering isn't just a little inconvenient or cumbersome at times, it's a HUGE PAIN.

ABS 15y ago

very nice but I don't see the disruption, at all. In fact I'm getting really tired of all the startups who call themselves disruptive, 99% of them aren't (and I'd argue you are disruptive when others call you so, not when you do it yourself)

twentysix 15y ago
They are doing something similar to the Dabbawalas but with restaurant food replacing home cooked food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabbawala You are right, I wouldnt call it disruptive either, but it is a very useful service. (and I'd argue you are disruptive when others call you so, not when you do it yourself) That applies to the word "Hacker" too.

thejteam 15y ago

The best way to profit from the gold rush is to sell shovels and pickaxes. Reminds me of the story of a saloon during the original California gold rush that would sell a bowl of soup for an astronomical sum. The people who stuck it rich would buy it so they could brag about how much they paid for a bowl of soup. Not sure how true it is, but believable.

arram 15y ago
Actually, our customers aren't just funded startups. We've got accounting firms, consumer electronics companies, design firms, law firms, media companies, telecoms, etc.
patja 15y ago
a bowel of soup? no thanks!
- dctoedt 15y ago
  Sort of like haggis [1], right? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis
theorique 15y ago
Reminds me of a joke about Russian oligarchs in the late 90s (when Communism collapsed, a lot of state industries were privatized, and a lot of people got rich very quickly and messily). Two 'new money' Russians are riding in a limousine in Moscow, and one says to the other "You know, I paid $1000 for this tie". The other guy says, "Idiot! I know a shop where you can get that tie for $2000!"

pessimist 15y ago

I wouldnt classify this as a disruption - more like a useful middleman.

simon_weber 15y ago
What do you see as the difference between the two? Or, put another way, what do you see as the requirements for a disruption? I don't see any reason why a middleman that's doing something innovative shouldn't be considered a disruption.
- vangale 15y ago
  I see "disruption" as either removing middlemen (disrupting supply chain) or changing consumer expectations in a market. Adding a middleman in the supply chain isn't disruption so much as making it more efficient for producers to reach consumers.
- pessimist 15y ago
  Agree with vangale, also a disruption is something that would likely cause an entire set of jobs/companies to be irrelevant, I don't see that here.
- dkrich 15y ago
  If you go by the Clayton Christensen definition, a disruptive company is basically one that starts off selling a product that is inferior to the accepted standard along most dimensions, but not all (usually it is much cheaper). Eventually the dimensions that were previously considered important erode or become altogether irrelevant, and suddenly the company focused on the lower-end segment finds itself in a position of dominance, while the former heavyweights are playing catchup. I agree that it is an often overused term and one which is too often used to describe innovative business models or small startups. I don't see how it applies here. That said, a business certainly does not need to be disruptive to be successful. Disruptive companies are extremely rare and only come along once in a while. I once had a professor who said that a great way to spot the potential for a disruptive product is to look for situations where you find yourself using a hybrid model- that is you use two or more solutions to solve a single problem. One meets a single need but not enough to replace the others.

yabbadabbadoo 15y ago

ZeroCater’s next market has yet to be determined Pls let it be New York City. We'd love to sign up.

encoderer 15y ago

We use Waiter.com's "virtual cafeteria service" here (a social startup in SOMA). Basically, every day they pick a restaurant. I place my order off the menu. It gets delivered w/ my name on it. Works fantastic.

starfox 15y ago

Too bad http://tacocopter.com/ http://tacocopter.com/ isn't out of closed beta yet.

btipling 15y ago

I appreciate all the work ZeroCater is doing to create a better catering experience. We use ZeroCater at our SF Rackspace office. Their customer service is very responsive. The website is great. My biggest complaint is how variable the food quality is. Sometimes it is pretty bad, in which case you can rank the quality low and leave a comment and ZeroCater will get back with you, which is great. Also variable is the labeling. I'm a vegetarian, often I have to play the guessing game of "is that meat or not?" Just last week I bit into a meat filled burrito that was in a bagged marked as 'vegan'. So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great.

larrys 15y ago
"So they'll have to work on the quality of the restaurants they make available, but the service itself is great." Their product is food. That's the important thing. All the CS and effort in the world is meaningless without the food quality being better than just acceptable and certainly not "pretty bad". In the non-startup world a restaurant serving bad food would only survive on a toll road rest stop or where there are no other alternatives.
binaryborealis 15y ago
Hey, this is Yoshi over at ZC. I handle the Rackspace account. I'm very sorry to say this is the first I've heard of your burrito incident, and I'm amazed that you don't sound more upset about it. Would you mind dropping me an email at hello@zerocater.com? I'd like to discuss how we can make it up to you. Thanks!
- larrys 15y ago
  "and I'm amazed that you don't sound more upset about it." ZC is a YC company. He's probably afraid of the downvotes if he doesn't keep up the crowd fawning going on here.
  - binaryborealis 15y ago
    :( That's a terrible reason to keep quiet about something this serious, though.

brezina 15y ago

Both of my companies www.sincerely.com & www.xobni.com are ZeroCater customers. The quality and diversity of the food we get is better with ZeroCater than when we ordered it ourselves. Also, the vendors show up on time. They know if we complain they won't just lose 1 customer - they may lose all of ZeroCater. Arram has found a true market need. His story of hustle is inspiring. I'm so genuinely excited by this perfect story of entrepreneurship. And I wish I would have invested.

philippb 15y ago
I lived together with Arram when he had 6 customers and did it with his mobile phone and a Excel spreadsheet by himself. I have to agree with what you say. A very inspiring story!
- arram 15y ago
  The AirBnB connection. :) Thanks Philip.
tikhon 15y ago
both of mine (parse.com and scribd.com) are also zerocater customers :-)

larrys 15y ago

Expanding ZeroCater will involve solving tremendous quality and logistical problems when attempted in the real world at "typical" companies. At the risk of sounding like the person who predicted the need for only 100 computers worldwide (or whatever that small number was) I don't see how this idea can be expanded to offer a similar service in the legacy corporate world where companies are not trying to be "mommy" to their workers to squeeze out ounces of extra productivity. Food service is really hard even if you operate the food service place and the people come to you. Here you are maintaining quality among multiple food places with many chances for things to get screwed up. Additionally the typical workplace is not filled with a young forgiving workforce.

eitally 15y ago
I disagree. As an employee in the legacy corporate world who has to suffer through crap every time lunch or dinner is catered in for a meeting, I would welcome healthier, better, more consistent options. I don't see many big businesses setting up daily deliveries en mass, but even if it was just weekly or at the group or departmental level, I can see a significant market for ZC.
- larrys 15y ago
  I am not saying that there isn't a market for what they do. I am saying that maintaining quality with this is extremely difficult. You are dealing with food service and rag tag food service at that. Having owned (non food service companies) that employ the type of workers that are essentially the same as in food service with an equivalent amount of variables (that can go wrong because of human error) it is my feeling that this is difficult to scale. And while it is true that zero cater will be an important customer to any of their vendors, they don't have control over hiring and food quality as well as other things that will impact their customer base. And they can't just switch to a supplier in another state. They are limited by the existing suppliers in their market. Now of course if they want to operate the food suppliers (with their own canteen) that would give them the control they need. But that is an entirely different business.

dmragone 15y ago

It might seem like a productivity win, but it may also be a creativity loss. A recent book by Jonah Lehrer http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0547386079/theeconomists-20 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0547386079/theeconomi... (I found out about it via The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21550235 http://www.economist.com/node/21550235) describes how creativity is most likely to happen at times of calm relaxation, such as a relaxed warm shower or a casual walk. There are times when I eat lunch at my desk to get more done, but I have found a casual stroll and lunch outside to be well worth the time and mental state it provides for thinking and creating.

aquark 15y ago
Often the most productive hour of my day design-wise is the hour long run at lunchtime. Not only that it makes the afternoon far more productive too as I am much more awake than if I skip it.