Your predecessor left three weeks ago. Somewhere in the transition there was a mention about "the office lunch thing," and now it is yours.
You do not know who the vendor contact is, only that orders arrive. You do not know what the contract says, or whether there is one. There is a dietary list, probably, in an inbox you cannot open. And on Thursday, forty people are expecting lunch.
This is normal. Half of all office and administrative support workers have been in their job less than 4.1 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the figure is lower for people in their late twenties and early thirties. The person who built your food program had a good chance of leaving before you arrived, and almost nobody writes this stuff down on the way out. It is not a sign that your company is badly run. It is just how operational knowledge works when it lives in one person's head.
Here is what to do about it.
First, do not change anything
The instinct when you inherit a mess is to fix it. Resist that for two weeks.
There is usually a reason the Tuesday order is different, or why one team always gets a separate delivery, or why the vendor shows up at 11:15 rather than noon. Your predecessor solved a problem you have not met yet. The loading dock closes at 11:30. Someone on the second floor has a severe allergy. The sales team eats early because of a standing call with Europe.
Change things before you understand them and you will spend your second month undoing your first. Spend the first two weeks finding out what exists.
Week one: eight things to find out
Who the actual human is. Not the support email address. The name and mobile number of the person who answers when an order is wrong at 11:50. Your predecessor had this relationship and you do not, so introduce yourself before you need something. A ten minute call now is worth a great deal on the day something goes missing.
Whether there is a contract, and when it renews. Find the paperwork. If nobody can find it, ask the vendor for a copy, which is a perfectly normal request. What you are looking for is the renewal date and whether it renews automatically. Auto renewing agreements that nobody is watching are the most common thing to inherit and the easiest to miss.
The cancellation window and the cutoff time. How late can you cancel without paying, and when does the order lock. Write both down somewhere other than your own notes. These two numbers will save you money within your first quarter, and you will need them on a day when something has gone wrong and you are not thinking clearly.
When the certificate of insurance expires. This is the one nobody tells you about. Most commercial buildings require vendors to carry a certificate of insurance naming the building as additional insured before they are allowed in. They lapse once a year, renewal is the vendor's responsibility, and that means nobody on your side is tracking it. A lapsed certificate puts your caterer out of compliance with your building's vendor rules, and property management can delay or refuse access until it is current. Your predecessor knew when it was due. Find out, and put it in your calendar with sixty days of warning.
The dietary list, which you should verify rather than inherit. This is the most important item here and the only one with a safety consequence. An inherited dietary list is a list of who worked here when it was written. People have joined, people have left, and some people's needs have changed. Confirm it directly with your current team instead of trusting a document you did not build. Ask in a way that lets people answer privately, because plenty of people would rather skip lunch than disclose a medical condition or a religious practice to a colleague. Then store it somewhere that survives you, not in your own email.
Building access, in detail. Dock hours, freight elevator booking, whether the driver needs an escort, whether there is a service entrance after a certain time. This is a common cause of late deliveries and it is entirely avoidable once you know the rules.
The budget, the code, and who approves what. How much is allocated, which cost centre it comes from, what you can authorise alone, and who signs off above that. Also find out who in finance sees this line item, because they will eventually ask you about it.
Who the backup is. If you are out and the delivery does not arrive, who handles it. If the answer is nobody, that is your first real finding.
What will bite you first
A few things tend to go wrong in the first ninety days, and all of them are predictable.
The contract renews quietly on terms your predecessor negotiated for a headcount you no longer have. Someone has an allergy that was never on the list. And the order size was set when the office was full five days a week, which it almost certainly is not now.
None of these are dramatic on their own. They are just the things that only live in one person's memory until that person leaves.
Month one: write it down
Once you know what you have, the job is making sure the next person does not start where you did.
Put it in one shared document, not in your inbox. Vendor names and the real phone numbers. Contract dates and renewal terms. The cancellation window and the order cutoff. The insurance expiry. Where the dietary list lives and when it was last checked. Delivery instructions including the dock and elevator details. The budget code and the approval path. And a short note on anything that looks strange, with the reason, so the next person does not undo it in their first week the way you were tempted to.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Most handover documents record what happens. Almost none record why, and why is the part that actually gets lost.
Then look at whether it still fits
After that, and only after that, you can start asking the real questions. Is the order sized for the office you have now or the one you had in 2023. Is participation holding steady or quietly declining. Does every location get the same thing, or has the headquarters quietly become the only place that gets fed. Is the program still doing what it was set up to do.
Those are better questions than any of them. But they are impossible to answer until you know what you inherited, and you cannot know that until somebody writes it down.
This time that somebody is you. So if you are someone taking over a program and not sure what you have? Book a demo and we will help you uncover the best options for your office food program.
