Bringing MENA Flavors to the Workplace Café

Walk through any food-forward city right now and you will see Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) food everywhere. The region’s bold flavors have moved from specialty restaurants into the culinary mainstream, and the momentum is only picking up with MENA cuisine transcending major urban centers to reach interested eaters across the country.

That is exactly the kind of inspiration our food innovation test kitchen, the f.i.t. Kitchen, is built to act on. When a cuisine clearly captures what guests crave when they leave work, our job is to bring it to our workplace-based cafés in a way that feels authentic, approachable and ready for the office lunch rush.

Finding the Throughline

MENA doesn’t encompass just one cuisine. Depending on which governing body you ask, the region officially spans 19 to 22 countries, representing a wide swath of ingredients and cultures. We started building our MENA Sufra program with a simple question: what is the unifying component across this whole region.

For us, the answer was the table itself. The program deliberately has sufra in the name — “dining table” in Arabic — and we centered it on a communal, mezze-style experience. On the protein side, kebabs and open-fire cooking became a throughline, allowing us to frame our menus as explorations of three destinations: the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa, giving guests an opportunity to pull components from across the region while still having a cohesive MENA experience.

What the Field Told Us

Before we launched, I spent a lot of time listening to chefs across our regions, and their excitement was consistent and evident. What surprised me most was how many of them said their guests had already been asking for MENA fare. When we proposed running the program as a limited-time offering, we got no pushback whatsoever. Out in the field for several launches myself, I watched guest participation run higher than I’ve seen for many of our other programs, to the point where MENA Sufra was often the most-visited station in the cafe that day; I saw only happy faces and empty plates.

As word of programs like this has spread, prospective clients have shown real enthusiasm for the kind of globally inspired, chef-driven dining MENA Sufra represents, wanting to know whether we can bring these experiences to their people. That tells me this isn’t just a guest preference; it’s becoming something organizations look for when they choose a food services partner. MENA cuisine also aligns naturally with the plant-forward direction many of our guests are already moving toward. In these cuisines, meat can act as more of an accent or add-on, while legumes, vegetables, herbs, olive oil, grains and bread do the heavy lifting.

The program celebrates approachable, plant-forward dishes like spiced farro with dates and raisins, Turkish-inspired kisir-style bulgur salad, baked sweet potato kibbeh, ras el hanout roasted cauliflower, Lebanese-style fasolia bi zeit green beans and brown rice malfouf mahshi cabbage rolls filled with herbs and warm spices.

The result is food that feels vibrant and satisfying while aligning with a wellness-forward approach.

Innovation as a System, Not a One-off

The MENA Sufra program won’t be one-and-done. We didn’t develop a few dishes to run once and revisit in three to five years. Instead, we built a system — a flexible set of formats, regional directions, proteins and supporting components that lets a chef build out many menus. As this proves out, we can go deeper and keep evolving because the f.i.t. Kitchen exists to establish those foundational pieces. If development is ongoing and innovative, our chefs stay inspired day to day. And with this much material, it’ll be difficult to get bored.

That same engine is what makes us a compelling partner to the organizations considering Guckenheimer. A program like MENA Sufra shows a prospective client what our innovation model delivers on an ongoing basis: fresh, relevant, chef-crafted experiences that keep their people engaged long after the contract is signed. When we win new business, it isn’t on the promise of a single standout menu; it’s on the strength of a system that keeps producing them.

At the end of the day, this is what being food obsessed looks like in practice. We don’t just want to be best-in-class providers of the typical salad and sandwich-based workplace lunch options. At its foundation, Guckenheimer is a community of chefs, and programs like MENA Sufra give our guests access to high-experience moments like they have at their favorite restaurants outside of their typical Monday-through-Friday routines.

And with MENA Sufra and more programs like it to come, Guckenheimer is just getting started.

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