Everyone who works at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in Burlington, Vt., is entitled to three free pints of ice cream for each day of work. At the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, employees are treated daily to an elaborate buffet with appropriately white-shoe fare like prime rib, crab cakes and housemade beignets.

And at the offices of the Perkins Eastman architecture firm, with locations on three continents, staff members can enjoy all manner of free snacks — just as long as they are orange, the color of the company’s logo. In New York, that means a lot of Cheetos, Goldfish and Nacho Cheese Doritos .

Free food has been a formidable presence in the American workplace since the 1990s, when Bloomberg and tech start-ups like Google began to put out snacks in hopes of making employees happier or healthier, more productive and less likely to stray far from the task at hand.

But today, the practice is almost obligatory, as businesses go to extraordinary lengths to provide food without charge, or at a sharp discount. The offerings have grown in size, scope and specificity — some tailored to a company’s mission, others unwittingly reflective of it and still others that seem oddly random.