Free food, during a limited, half-hour window, both saves people some hassle and gets them to show up at the same time to kick off the workday.

To understand why this is so important, picture Pivotal without free breakfast. Let’s start with the obvious. Most developers would sleep late if it were up to them. They’d roll into the office around 10 or 11 AM. Which means they’d grab a coffee, maybe respond to a few emails, and then sync up with the team.

Before you know it, the morning is over and it’s time for lunch. But hey, that’s okay, we live in a digital world, and you can show up whenever, so long as you get your work done, right? Wrong. Pair programming only works when you have people to pair with. And that means you need to sync their schedules.

We ring a cowbell at 9:05 AM. (The Toronto office smacks a golden gong with a mallet.) It signals that breakfast is over and the office-wide meeting is about to start. After the five-minute standup, the teams have their own standup meetings, and then pairs break off to get rolling at their workstations.

While posed as a pair programming enabler, take out pairing from the above and it also gets the point of having people show-up on-time, not dick around, and do actual work.

If you’ve seen me talk you know the joke of “how a developer spends their day” which usually includes 1-2 hours of actual coding because of all the meetings, you know, those 30 minute sitdown-standup meetings, architectrual reviews, deciding where to go to lunch, the post-lunch-buffet comma, “researching on the Internet, etc…. it’s all just unsynchronized schedules and little not attention spent on actually managing your staff’s time.

Source: Why My Company Serves Free Breakfast to All Employees