Corporate catering unicorn ezCater lays off hundreds

ezCater, a Boston-based corporate catering startup valued last year at $1.25 billion, on Tuesday laid off more than 400 of its 900 employees, the company confirms to Axios.

The big picture: This is just the latest in a rapid series of major "unicorn" layoffs, particularly for companies servicing a market that has largely evaporated (in this case, hungry office workers).

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Tough day here at @ezCater. At a bit of a loss for words. Even if I had the words, none of them would be able to fully describe how I feel about the amazing, hard-working, impressive, empathetic, scrappy, and talented coworkers that are moving on toward their next adventure today

— David Goldsmith (@dgoldy216) April 7, 2020

ezCater's statement:

"There is not enough sugar on the planet to sugarcoat this: we’re a company that feeds meetings, and meetings are not happening much right now. We were crushing our 2020 plan, until coronavirus hit.

Now, we have to scale back until the world returns. We painstakingly identified the roles we need to be successful today and tomorrow, and are parting ways with over 400 employees across all four ezCater offices. That hurts. With each one of them, we are sorry to say goodbye.

Coronavirus is accelerating the move of restaurants and catering online. ezCater is well-capitalized and remains as ready as ever to help our catering partners grow their business and help our customers succeed. When business gets back to work, ezCater will be here to feed every kind of meeting."

Update: An earlier version of this story reported that the company began with 750 employees, rather than 900.