Remember the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was recently signed into law earlier this month? Well, it might be coming for your snacks.

Currently, many workplaces provide free snacks to their employees—an incentive that has been shown to boost office morale and encourage longer working hours. Companies received tax deductions for such snacks. Back in 2017, a law was introduced that halved those deductions, with a scheduled elimination altogether by the end of 2025. Well, that time has come, and the new tax legislation signed in July 2025 would maintain the elimination of the office snack deduction.

Why is this important? According to MyShortlister, the benefits of company-provided snacks are twofold. Free snacks significantly improve employee retention and overall happiness, and employees who are satisfied with work perks (such as free food) tend to show increased productivity. A win for both employers and employees!

Citing a Staples study, Forbes reported that coffee and snack runs account for approximately 2.4 billion hours of lost productivity in the U.S. each year—something that this new law is likely to exacerbate.

So why get rid of this incentive? The government hopes to rake in a pretty penny while keeping its fingers crossed that companies will stock the snack drawers anyway. Nobody wants hangry employees.

Come January 1, 2026, all "free" snacks will be taxed in the United States, meaning that companies will have to make some big decisions in the coming months about how they want to run their businesses. We've always known food to be a great incentive (why do you think I love going into the Delish office so much?), so it'll be interesting to see how things shake out.