Google developed a reputation in the mid-aughties for its lavish employee perks, particularly their corporate kitchens dishing out gourmet meals for their well-fed workers. But in a recent Business Insider profile of Nate Keller, the former Google executive chef unveiled the high cost of keeping Mountain View's advertising talent nourished:

[Keller] grew the kitchen staff to 675 employees and was responsible for serving 40,000 meals per day by the time. By the time Keller left Google in 2008, Googlers were eating $1 million worth of chicken per month.

Holy shit! That's a lot of bird. In fact, assuming every single one of Google's then 20,222 employees were chowing down on campus, the company was shelling out nearly $50 per employee every month just on flightless fowl. And never mind the venerable Gum Drop Mountain of snacks kept on hand to make sure employee blood sugar levels don't fall too low.

Fifty bucks per person may not seem like a lot, but the wholesale cost of chicken was 71.1 cents a pound in 2008, according to the USDA. That means Googlers were gobbling up just under three pounds of poultry a day. Compare that to Proposition Chicken: an employee of the popular San Francisco restaurant says they go through approximately 100 pounds of chicken a day, with the average order being under one pound each.

Once again, Silicon Valley is plump with perks.

Photo: AP