In the Netherlands, meals and other benefits provided by the employer are taxed into oblivion after a certain amount. It makes a lot of financial sense to just give your employees more money here and let them buy their own stuff after income tax. The way it works is that a company can spend 1.2% of the yearly income on the employee in terms of coffee, company retreats, free lunches, whatever they please, but over that you pay a huge tax rate which make the expense slightly higher than an employee buying it themselves after income tax. Some things are exempt from this, such as free fruit.
In practice this means that the cheaper things, such as coffee and tea are usually free (at least in offices with white collar workers) and the more expensive things such as dinner are usually not employer provided. Company provided lunch does exist, and seems to be on the rise, but due to the spartan nature of Dutch lunch, companies are usually able to squeeze that in the 1.2% given that the yearly salaries are high enough. It seems to me that all of this is quite a nice compromise between employers running your life and you thus being limited in your choices, while still offering free coffee and the like.
Edit: misremembered the amount, changed 1.8 to 1.2%
I just ran some numbers. The average salary of Dutch Software Engineer is €42,993[1]. 1.2% of €42,993 = €516.
There are 261 weekdays in a year; subtract 30 holiday/vacation days from that, you get 221 working days.
€516 / 221 = €2.23
Can lunch be a mere €2.23 (US$2.50) in the Netherlands?
My employer delivers free lunch to all its employees everyday as well ( via a service called https://www.servedbystadium.com/ ), but the cost of this is typically around $15-$20 per meal.
(I estimate my employer has allocated about $4000/year per employee for the free lunch. That's around 2% to 3% of the salary of most of our software engineers, but salaries on average are about 3 times[2] in the U.S. compared to the Netherlands.)
I think €2.23 is a little on the light side, but not unrealistic, considering that a Dutch lunch mostly consists of cheap sliced bread with some form of stuff spread out on it, mostly Gouda cheese, or any of the sweet stuff like the traditional chocolaty sprinkles: hagelslag. I talked to the guy that buys the lunch at our office, and his estimate is anywhere between €2.50 and €3.50 per person a day, but he did not have hard numbers. For Dutch standards, our lunch is considered quite luxurious.
Then again, I'm not exactly sure what part of that is just lower prices in supermarkets. As a student I routinely could cook dinner for under €2.50 per person, although nowadays I'm averaging more like €4 pp, with rising prices and me cooking for a smaller group.
In practice this means that the cheaper things, such as coffee and tea are usually free (at least in offices with white collar workers) and the more expensive things such as dinner are usually not employer provided. Company provided lunch does exist, and seems to be on the rise, but due to the spartan nature of Dutch lunch, companies are usually able to squeeze that in the 1.2% given that the yearly salaries are high enough. It seems to me that all of this is quite a nice compromise between employers running your life and you thus being limited in your choices, while still offering free coffee and the like.
Edit: misremembered the amount, changed 1.8 to 1.2%