Food insecurity is often assumed to mainly affect people who are not working, but with rising grocery prices, food insecurity is becoming a prevalent issue in the workplace. By Dr Ussama Ahmad Khan, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School
Ask most senior leaders to name the biggest threats to their workforce’s productivity, and you’ll hear the usual suspects: burnout, disengagement, poor management. What you almost never hear is hunger. Yet 13.5% of all U.S. households experienced food insecurity last year — some 47.4 million people — and critically, half of U.S. households experiencing food insecurity are headed by someone who is employed. This is not a crisis that lives outside the office. It walks in through the front door every morning.
The US is not alone in this. According to the Food Foundation, nearly one in eight households in the UK is now affected by food insecurity, and the UN estimates that 28% of the world’s population — 2.3 billion people — do not have reliable access to enough food.
With organisations increasingly investing in initiatives that address employees’ higher-level needs, such as engagement initiatives and meditation programs, research that I have carried out into ‘The effects of food insecurity on work outcomes‘ suggests that business leaders may want to step back and first ask whether their employees’ most basic needs are being met.
The Cognitive Cost No One Is Measuring
Food insecurity is not simply about immediate hunger. It is about the persistent, grinding anxiety of not knowing whether you will have enough. That anxiety has a measurable cognitive cost. When people are in survival mode — preoccupied with where their next meal is coming from, or whether the groceries will last the week — their executive functioning deteriorates. Research confirms that resource deprivation can cause a literal drop in effective IQ. Attention narrows. Decision-making suffers. The mental bandwidth required to do good work simply is not there.
My research, first published in the Journal of Applied Psychology with co-authors Jason Moy, Wei Jee Ong and Christopher Barnes, set out to test precisely how this plays out at work. Across three studies, we examined the impact of food insecurity on three core workplace outcomes that rely heavily on cognitive and attentional bandwidth: task performance, work engagement, and organisational citizenship behaviour — how helpful people are to colleagues, beyond the strict requirements of their role.
In the first study, 375 employed U.S. adults who had experienced food insecurity were asked to recall a specific occasion and describe how they felt and behaved at work that day. In a second study, 567 participants kept weekly diaries over four weeks. Both studies pointed to the same conclusion: food insecurity drives anxiety, and that anxiety makes employees less effective at work.
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When You Provide Food, Performance Follows
The most compelling part of our research was a field experiment — because it showed the problem is not just diagnosable, it is solvable.
We partnered with the social enterprise Rizq in Pakistan, where food inflation had reached 40% following catastrophic flooding that submerged a third of the country. We randomly assigned 196 workers — factory workers, domestic cleaners, taxi drivers, manual labourers and administrative staff — to receive either a package of food staples (rice, lentils, flour, cooking oil, dates, sugar and tea) or a non-food package of equivalent monetary value (household essentials such as soap and toothpaste).
The results were unambiguous. Workers who received food reported significantly lower anxiety and meaningfully better work outcomes than those who received household goods of the same value.
A separate study of mine, Addressing insomnia symptoms through food aid to those with food insecurity, published in Sleep Health, found that food aid also reduced insomnia among food-insecure workers — with direct implications for the workplace accidents, errors and presenteeism that cost organisations billions each year.
Who Is Actually Affected — And Why Leaders Miss It
Part of the problem is visibility. Food insecurity disproportionately affects lower-wage, frontline workers — the delivery drivers, construction workers, and store assistants whose labour underpins the services the rest of us rely on. Social science research has historically overlooked this population in favour of white-collar workers. So has corporate leadership. A survey of University of California employees, however, found that more than 70% of its clerical and support workers were affected. The issue is hiding in plain sight.
What Good Leadership Looks Like Here
The UN has been explicit: governments and nonprofits cannot resolve food insecurity without private sector engagement. Organisations do not need to overhaul their entire benefits strategy to make a meaningful difference. There are practical, low-cost interventions that work.
Negotiating bulk purchasing discounts with local grocery stores and passing savings to employees through free or discounted food costs little but signals a great deal. On-site food pantries, partnerships with local food banks, and subsidised transportation to food resources — especially for employees in food deserts where there are no supermarkets or large grocery stores — can meaningfully reduce the anxiety load that is quietly eroding performance.
Organisations can also help by educating employees about accessing local welfare programmes and food banks, or setting up a community garden at the workplace that allows employees to grow their own fruits and vegetables.
In the UK, 17,000 companies — including Barclays, KPMG, Aviva and IKEA — have signed up to the Living Wage Foundation’s accreditation, recognising that baseline economic security is foundational to everything else.
The principle is simple, and it is one that some organisations are already articulating clearly: you cannot build resilience, engagement or innovation on an empty stomach.
Organisations are investing heavily in meditation apps, mental health platforms and leadership coaching. These are not bad investments. But they rest on a flawed assumption — that employees’ basic physiological needs have already been met. For a significant and growing proportion of the workforce, they have not.
The most foundational leadership question right now is not how to drive engagement. It is whether the people you are trying to engage had enough to eat this week.
Dr. Ussama Ahmad Khan is Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. His research is rooted in his deep belief in the role organisations can have in addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing the world today – including climate change, poverty, and slavery. His work focuses on the intersection of organisational behaviour and social impact, examining how businesses can contribute to solving global challenges while understanding the human implications of these efforts.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
