In the first months of his PhD program, Jason Moy found himself performing calculations that many graduate students know well. Not about statistical models or research methodologies, but about groceries. Fruit was a “luxury.” Every purchase meant weighing whether the money spent on protein would deliver more calories and more fullness than spending it on fresh produce.
“I wouldn’t call it food insecurity because I certainly ate enough food each day,” Moy says. “But the choice of food was something I had to think about quite often.”
Moy’s experience—and the experiences of others he knew who visited the University of Washington’s food pantry to feed their families—sparked a question that would become his first research project as lead author: What happens when employees can’t reliably access enough food? Not just to their health or well-being, but to their performance at work?
The answer, which was just published in the Journal of Applied Psychology’s special issue on Social Impact Research, has profound implications for businesses everywhere.
Food insecurity affects millions of employed workers
Food insecurity, defined as inadequate access to safe and nutritious food, affects approximately 2.3 billion people worldwide. But there’s a widespread misconception about who experiences it.
The assumption is that food insecurity primarily affects those who are unemployed. Existing data shows otherwise. More than half of food-insecure households in the U.S. have at least one member employed full-time, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In Washington State, a 2024 survey found that 51% of employed households experienced food insecurity. Other reports revealed that 70% of clerical and support workers at the University of California were food insecure. Perhaps most striking: 78% of Kroger grocery store employees—workers literally surrounded by food all day—reported experiencing food insecurity.
“I was particularly surprised by how pervasive food insecurity is and how many working people were affected,” Moy says.
Moy brought the idea to his advisor, Foster School of Business professor Christopher M. Barnes, who connected him with two recent Foster PhD graduates: Ussama Ahmad Khan (now at London Business School), who had Pakistan connections from his own dissertation research, and Wei Jee Ong (now at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology).
“Food insecurity isn’t about being hungry in the moment; it’s about the persistent worry of not knowing whether you’ll be able to access food in the future.”—Jason Moy
How food anxiety reduces work performance
The research team employed a multi-method approach, consisting of an experimental recall study with 375 U.S. workers, a four-week diary study tracking 567 U.S. workers, and a field experiment in Pakistan that provided food packages to 196 workers experiencing high levels of food insecurity.
Across all three studies, Moy and his colleagues found that food insecurity hurts work performance—and that the reason is anxiety. Food insecurity isn’t about being hungry in the moment; it’s about the persistent worry of not knowing whether you’ll be able to access food in the future. That worry consumes mental energy that would otherwise go toward work.
“People experiencing food insecurity are preoccupied with food-related thoughts,” Moy explains. “That consumes time and cognitive resources, diverting their attention from work and leading to poorer work outcomes.”
The numbers are striking. In the recall study, compared to food-secure individuals, those experiencing food insecurity reported 115% higher anxiety, 18.7% lower task performance, 34% lower work engagement, and 23% fewer helping behaviors toward colleagues.
The research indicates that food insecurity has an independent impact on work outcomes, even after accounting for financial security more broadly.
This finding is consistent with existing research on scarcity mindset, which suggests that resource constraints narrow attention toward survival needs.
Testing solutions in Pakistan
For the field experiment, the team collaborated with a non-governmental organization in Lahore, Pakistan—a developing country experiencing 40% food price inflation at the time, with over 40% of the population facing food insecurity.
Workers were randomly assigned to receive either a food package (cooking oil, lentils, rice, wheat flour, sugar, dates, and tea) or a control package of hygiene products. The non-food control ruled out placebo effects, demonstrating that providing food specifically could improve work outcomes.
The results showed that those who received food packages experienced 13.4% lower anxiety, with improvements of 8.3% in task performance and 12.6% in work engagement.
“Our field experiment shows that providing food to food-insecure employees can improve their work engagement and performance,” Moy says.
“By helping food-insecure employees, organizations are actually helping themselves, because they are helping to improve the performance of those employees.”—Jason Moy
What organizations can do
So what should business leaders do with this research? First, they need to recognize that food insecurity likely affects their own workforce. Leaders often underestimate how prevalent food insecurity is and assume it doesn’t occur within their teams, in part because employees feel ashamed to acknowledge such experiences. In reality, it’s a widespread issue. Moy hopes to shift the narrative and help people understand that food insecurity can affect people across all demographics.
“I want to show that ordinary people who do not fall into traditionally assumed categories still struggle with food access,” Moy says.
“Today, organizations are increasingly involved in implementing policies that address individual well-being concerns, such as mental health issues. Despite this progress, food insecurity remains largely unacknowledged, leaving affected employees without formal support from their organizations.”
The research reframes the conversation. From a shareholder-centric perspective, supporting food-insecure employees might seem outside a firm’s responsibility. However, Moy’s findings reveal that it’s not just humanitarian; it also directly affects labor productivity and organizational performance. In other words, businesses have a compelling reason to care: their bottom line.
The practical steps are straightforward. Organizations could provide free or discounted food to employees (including at-work meals in an employee cafeteria), negotiate bulk purchasing discounts with local grocery stores, collaborate with food banks to establish on-site food pantries, such as the one at the University of Washington, or offer transportation to food banks for employees in food deserts.
“By helping food-insecure employees, organizations are actually helping themselves,” Moy says, “because they are helping to improve the performance of those employees.”
For Moy, this research represents more than just documenting a problem and its solution. Reflecting on how this first research project shaped his academic trajectory, Moy is clear about what drives him.
“I feel like the kind of research that addresses societal grand challenges—like food insecurity, which is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal—is what I want to pursue,” he says.
His broader research agenda focuses on understanding how unmet basic needs ripple through people’s work lives. By demonstrating the organizational costs of ignoring these fundamental challenges, he aims to encourage greater business engagement in addressing them—whether that involves tackling concerns such as hunger, housing insecurity, or other basic needs that are too often overlooked in workplace research.
Read the full research paper here: Moy, J. H., Khan, U. A., Ong, W. J., & Barnes, C. M. (2026). The effects of food insecurity on work outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication.