Every family office and private office in Singapore eventually runs into the same question. It sounds simple: how do we feed our team well?
The team is small, the standards are high, and the days are long. People eat at their desks or in the office dining room, lunch and often dinner too. Whatever the food solution is, it has to work every single day — not just impress once.
Most offices we speak to have already tried everything by the time they call us. So here's the honest comparison, from people who've seen how each option plays out.
Option one: food delivery
This is where almost every office starts, because it requires zero setup. Everyone orders what they want, the company pays, done.
And for a while, it works. Then the problems creep in. The quality is inconsistent — the same dish from the same place can be great on Tuesday and disappointing on Thursday. The healthy options are limited and repetitive, so people drift toward whatever tastes good, which in Singapore usually means heavier, oilier, more carb-loaded food. The team hits the 3pm slump. And after months of the same rotation, everyone is quietly bored but nobody wants to be the one to raise lunch as an agenda item.
Delivery is convenient. But for a team eating together every day for years, convenience isn't the same as a solution.
Option two: office catering
The next step most offices try. A caterer delivers a daily spread — buffet trays, individual bento sets, sometimes a rotating menu.
Catering solves the ordering chaos and looks organised. But it shares delivery's core problem: the food is cooked hours earlier, somewhere else, in bulk. It arrives warm at best. The menu is designed for the caterer's operational efficiency, not your team's health goals. Specific dietary needs — low carb, high protein, allergies, a partner who eats fish only — become special requests that may or may not survive contact with a production kitchen serving forty other clients.
For events, catering is exactly right. As the daily answer for a discerning team, it tends to disappoint slowly.
Option three: restaurant rotations and allowances
Some offices give the team lunch allowances or book regular tables nearby. The food quality is higher, and getting out of the office has real value.
But as a daily system it breaks down. It fragments the team rather than bringing them together. It costs more per head than any other option once you're at Singapore CBD restaurant prices five days a week. It doesn't solve dinner for the late nights. And you have no control over nutrition — a restaurant's job is to make food delicious, not to keep your team sharp for the afternoon.
Option four: an in-house private chef
This is the option most offices don't realise exists — because until recently, in Singapore, it barely did.
One professional chef, embedded in your office, cooking fresh every day in your own kitchen or pantry. The menu is designed around your team: their dietary requirements, their health goals, their preferences, refined week after week by someone who learns them the way a private chef learns a family.
Fresh food, cooked on-site, served at its best. Low carb and high protein if that's the brief — done properly, with variety, by a specialist who makes healthy food people genuinely look forward to. Lunch and dinner covered, including the late nights that delivery used to handle badly. One consistent standard, one accountable professional, every day.
The economics surprise people too. Between daily delivery for the whole team, catering contracts, or restaurant allowances at Singapore prices, many offices are already spending in the range an in-house chef costs — just spread across invoices nobody adds up, for food nobody is excited about.
Why offices are switching
We recently signed a private office in Asia Square that had been through this exact journey — years of delivery, growing tired of the quality, unable to find the in-house option they actually wanted. When they found us, their relief was genuine. They'd been looking for a long time.
They're not unusual. When your people are your entire asset, how well they eat isn't a perk line in the budget. It's a daily input into how they think, perform, and feel. The offices that understand this are quietly moving to in-house chefs — and the ones we work with tend to say the same thing a few months in: they should have done it sooner.
How it works with Le Petit Marché
We handle the hard part — finding the right chef. Our network includes chefs who specialise in exactly this kind of cooking: health-focused, precise, consistent, suited to a professional environment. We match the chef to your office's brief, structure the engagement properly with correct contracts, and stay involved to make sure it works as well in month six as in week one.
If your office has been cycling through delivery and catering and quietly wishing there were a better way — there is. Tell us about your team and we'll take it from there.
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Le Petit Marché is Singapore's private chef concierge agency, founded by Chef Nicolas Reynard and Kai. We match families, family offices, and private offices with chefs we've trained, vetted, and genuinely stand behind.
