Microsoft’s One Esterra Park sits within a 175-acre Overlake Village neighborhood in the Overlake area of Redmond, which is also home to Nintendo of America’s headquarters.

The building that has received particular environmental plaudits within their campus is a recently opened kitchen and food hall that is deservedly being talked about as a ‘kitchen of the future’.

Employees on the campus are no doubt enthralled by the choice of cuisine on offer from its nine food stations that cater to global cuisine tastes from the best local guest chefs and restaurants.

However, they can also be comforted by the knowledge that its 13,200 square feet of cooking space are powered by electricity — in other words, there isn’t a CO2 intensive gas flame in sight, despite serving as many as 10,500 meals per day.

Under its Energy and Atmosphere scoring by the LEED (2022), Microsoft’s foodhall earns 22 out of 25 on “optimizing energy performance”, and also earns a maximum score for its use of “low-emitting materials”.

Jodi Smith Westwater, senior services manager for Microsoft dining operations, told GeekWire that she hopes this office innovation will have “a ripple effect on culinary, restaurants, chefs, on the industry as a whole… Because if we can do it here with 1,000 transactions a day there’s really no reason anyone couldn’t do the same thing”.

LEED Rating: Platinum – 81