What’s in Your Cup? Rethinking Workplace Beverage Habits

Most workplace wellness strategies account for the gym reimbursement, the EAP, the annual biometric screening. Few account for the four cups of coffee an employee drinks between the morning standup and the afternoon slump.

The beverage cart rarely makes it into the wellbeing plan, even though what people drink every day shapes their energy, focus, sleep, and stress.

That gap is the subject of this Road2Wellbeing episode. Samantha Levin sat down with Sivakumar VP, founder of Well O Sip Tisanes Pvt. Ltd. and a 30-year veteran of employee benefits and health insurance, to look at a habit hiding in plain sight: the office caffeine cycle, and what it costs.

The blind spot in the benefits budget

Sivakumar spent 15 years inside the health insurance world, working with corporate clients and reading employee claims up close. The pattern he kept seeing was not a shortage of healthcare. It was a shortage of attention to daily habits.

“Organizations focused heavily on treatment, healthcare benefits, and insurance claims, but far less on the daily habits that influence wellbeing.”

Fatigue, stress, poor sleep, digestive discomfort, and burnout showed up again and again in the data, while the lifestyle contributors behind them went unaddressed.

Workplace beverage culture was the clearest example. Companies invested in wellness programs while employees moved through the day on sugary drinks, energy drinks, and coffee.

Eagle Hill’s 2025 Workforce Burnout Survey, conducted by Ipsos, found that 55 percent of US workers are currently burned out. The prevention conversation still trails the treatment conversation, even though what an employee puts in their body each day is the foundation the rest sits on.

A cycle, not a willpower problem

The average American coffee drinker takes in around three cups a day, most of it at work, and spends close to $1,100 a year on it. The issue, Sivakumar noted, is not whether coffee is good or bad. It is whether we consume it consciously or automatically.

He described a loop most professionals will recognize. You wake up tired and reach for caffeine to feel alert. Energy dips in the afternoon, so you reach for more. Caffeine later in the day interferes with sleep, poor sleep feeds the next day’s fatigue, and the fatigue sends you back to the cup. Each step reinforces the next.

This matters for how HR leaders frame the conversation. The cycle is biological, not a matter of discipline. The body responds to what it is repeatedly given. Penalizing the employee misses the point.

“The biggest conversation is not about eliminating caffeine. It is about helping people understand their own relationship with it, and creating a healthier alternative when needed.”

His practical guidance is plain: be cautious, be clear about what you are drinking, and watch how your body responds. Every person is different, so what works for one will not map onto the next. The skill being built is awareness.

Expanding options, not removing them

When the conversation turned to solutions, Sivakumar made a point worth keeping for any wellness rollout. The goal is not to replace what people already do. It is to expand their choices.

Growing up in India, he explained, herbal beverages were part of daily life — infusions made from kitchen ingredients like ginger, turmeric, and Tulsi (holy basil), consumed as routine rather than as medicine. These practices were built around balance and seasonality and passed down over generations, though much of that habit has faded over the last 30 years.

Adoption rises when the healthier choice is as easy and accessible as the default, and when employees are not asked to overhaul their routine to participate.

Two markets, two lessons

India carries a deep heritage of herbal wellness ritual, but urban work life is increasingly adopting high-caffeine, convenience-driven, often sugary consumption. What it can borrow from the US is structured, well-run workplace wellbeing programs.

The US runs the other way. The functional beverage market here is worth roughly $50 billion and growing fast — from mushroom coffee to matcha to kombucha — so the appetite for alternatives is already there. What is missing, Samantha noted, is the prevention mindset. American health culture tends to be reactive, waiting until something is wrong before acting. The idea of small daily rituals that keep a person balanced before problems appear is not yet built into most workplaces. There is also a difference in how the drink is treated: warm and intentional in one culture, iced and on the go while doing three other things in the other.

Put together, the US has the infrastructure, the innovation, and the appetite for change. India has centuries of evidence about what supports the body. The opportunity sits in the bridge between them.

What HR leaders can take from this

The throughline of the episode is a reframe of where wellbeing actually lives. As Sivakumar put it in his closing takeaway, workplace wellness is not built only through policies, benefits, or annual initiatives. It is built through everyday choices and rituals.

For HR and people teams, that points to a few practical shifts:

• Audit the inputs, not just the programs
  Look at what is stocked in the break room and what people reach for through the day. It is part of the wellbeing picture, not separate from it.
• Design for awareness, not restriction
  Help employees understand their own caffeine, hydration, and sleep patterns rather than policing them. Awareness is what changes behavior.
• Make the better option the easy option
  Adoption follows access. An alternative that sits right next to the coffee, requiring no lifestyle overhaul, will outperform one that asks for a full reset.
• Weigh daily rituals against one-off events
  A single wellness day spends the budget once. Small, repeated daily habits compound. Sivakumar’s argument to corporates was direct: a shift in daily rituals delivers more benefit than spending the entire budget on a single wellness day.

This is where the holistic model earns its keep. Beverage habits sit at the intersection of physical health, occupational wellbeing, and stress — three of the eight pillars that frame how we think about workforce health at Wellness360. None of them moves in isolation. Sleep affects focus, focus affects stress, stress affects what you reach for at 3 p.m. The daily cup is a small lever on a connected system.

Samantha came into the conversation a self-described coffee person and left reconsidering the afternoon cup. That shift, multiplied across a workforce, is the kind of change that does not show up in a benefits brochure but shows up in how people feel at work.