Picking a corporate gift usually comes down to a guess about what will land well. But there's actual research behind why food, more than almost any other gift category, is one of the good corporate gifts that consistently works, and it starts in an unlikely place: firehouses, not boardrooms.
The Research Behind Why We Bond Over Food
Cornell researcher Kevin Kniffin tracked 395 supervisors across more than 50 firehouses over 15 months and found that platoons who ate meals together consistently earned higher performance ratings than those who didn't. The mechanism isn't unique to firehouses. It's the same reason corporate food gifts do more for a business relationship than a gift card or a branded mug: they stand in for the shared table, even when the two of you never actually sit down together.
"Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills back over into work."Kevin Kniffin, Cornell University, lead researcher on the firehouse commensality study
He also found the reverse held true: a crew that stopped eating together was often a visible signal that "something deeper was wrong with the way the group worked," a finding later featured in the Harvard Business Review.
Gifts That Actually Get Opened
None of that matters if the gift doesn't get opened in the first place, and food has an edge here too. A well-made food gift cuts through the noise of a crowded inbox simply because curiosity about what's inside a box is hard to ignore.
That gap between the two numbers is the whole opportunity: almost everyone will open a package at their desk, but almost none of them expect it to be worth their time once they do. A food gift is one of the few corporate gifts that reliably closes that gap.
Food Gifts vs. Branded Merch: A Side-By-Side Look
Put the two most common corporate gift categories next to each other, and the case for food gets easier to see at a glance.
| What Matters | Food Gifts | Branded Merch |
|---|---|---|
| Likely to Be Opened | 81% of work packages get opened (Forrester/PFL) | Often set aside once recognized as promotional swag |
| Emotional Connection | Built on a shared, sensory experience | A logo on an object, with no experience attached |
| Becomes a Tradition | Recipients come to expect and look forward to it | Rarely anticipated year to year |
| Shareability | Naturally shared at a table, in a break room, or across an office | A solo item; nothing to share |
Traditions Clients and Employees Actually Remember
A one-time gift is nice. A gift that becomes an expected tradition is what actually builds a relationship over years, not months. The corporate gifts people remember are rarely the flashiest ones; they're the ones sent consistently enough that the recipient starts to associate your company with the moment itself, the way a client might come to expect, and look forward to, a Padow's ham arriving every holiday season. That's the real opportunity behind corporate holiday gifts: done consistently, they stop being a transaction and start being a tradition.
Why Food Gifts Work Even When Relationships Are Remote
This matters more now than it used to. Genuine connection, wherever it comes from, meaningfully offsets the isolation of distributed work, and a food gift closes part of that gap in a way most gifts can't: it gives someone something to physically sit down and enjoy, which is about as close as you can get to sharing a meal with a client or colleague you can't actually meet for lunch.
It's part of why corporate holiday gifts for employees, especially distributed ones, tend to land better as something they can actually eat than as another branded object for the desk.
What This Means for Your Next Corporate Gift
Taken together, this points to a fairly clear conclusion: good corporate gifting needs to get opened, get remembered, and ideally get shared, and food consistently clears all three bars in a way that swag and gift cards don't. If you're looking for corporate gifting ideas that hold up to that standard, corporate holiday gifts for clients and corporate holiday gifts for employees are really the same brief: send something worth sharing, not something worth filing away.
Taste the Difference for Yourself
Padow's has been part of that kind of table since 1936, curing Virginia country ham the traditional way in Richmond: pork, salt, and time, nothing else. Whether it's a whole country ham sent to a client's office or a gift box shipped to a remote employee, it's the same principle behind the firehouse study: a shared meal, even a gifted one, still does something a gift card or a branded mug never will.
Sources
Kniffin, Kevin M., et al. "Eating Together at the Firehouse: How Workplace Commensality Relates to the Performance of Firefighters." Human Performance, vol. 28, no. 4, 2015, tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08959285.2015.1021049.
Cornell University. "Groups That Eat Together Perform Better Together." Cornell Chronicle, 30 Nov. 2015, news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/11/groups-eat-together-perform-better-together.
Forrester Consulting. B2B package engagement research commissioned by PFL, as reported in Adweek, "Corporate Gifting Keeps on Giving for B-to-B Marketers," adweek.com/brand-marketing/corporate-gifting-b-to-b-marketers.
Sendoso. Corporate gifting and decision-maker research, as reported in Adweek, "Corporate Gifting Keeps on Giving for B-to-B Marketers," adweek.com/brand-marketing/corporate-gifting-b-to-b-marketers.
Gallup. "1 in 5 Employees Worldwide Feel Lonely." Gallup, gallup.com/workplace/645566/employees-worldwide-feel-lonely.aspx.
If you're planning this year's corporate gifting and want it to land differently than the usual mugs and gift cards, start with real food: bulk pricing on whole hams, or a ready-to-send option from our corporate food gift baskets, built for lists of any size.
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