Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has reportedly fired around 24 staff at its Los Angeles offices for using their $25 (£19) meal credit to buy items such as toothpaste, laundry detergent and wine glasses.

The £1.2 trillion technology company, which also owns messaging platform WhatsApp, is said to have fired employees last week after an investigation found staff had abused the system, including by sending food home if they didn’t were in the office.

This included an unnamed employee with a salary of $400,000 who said he used his meal credits to buy household items and groceries such as toothpaste and tea.

On the anonymous messaging platform Blind, they wrote: “On days when I wouldn’t be eating at the office, such as when my husband was cooking or when I was eating with friends, I thought I shouldn’t waste the dining credit.”

The employee admitted the offense when contacted as part of a staff investigation into the practice and was later dismissed. “It was almost surreal that this was happening,” the person wrote, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the story.

Some employees were also found to have spent the credit on other household items, such as acne pads. Employees who had only occasionally broken the rules were reprimanded but kept their jobs, the newspaper said.

Free food has long been one of the perks of working for big tech companies.

Meta, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, typically feeds its staff for free from the cafeterias of its larger offices, including its sprawling Silicon Valley headquarters.

But those in smaller locations will receive daily credit to order food through delivery services like UberEats and Grubhub. The per diem includes $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and $25 for dinner.

In 2022, the company caused an uproar among staff after it decided to delay its daily free dining service at its Silicon Valley campus by half an hour to 6:30 p.m., as part of broader budget cuts. It meant fewer employees would eat on campus if they managed to catch the last shuttle leaving the site at 6 p.m. It also made it harder for employees to stock up on free food and take it home as leftovers.

Other major tech companies have also cracked down on their employees’ benefits. Google began cutting back on fitness classes and the frequency of laptop replacements last year. The company had also reportedly become stricter on office supplies, including staplers and adhesive tape, with staff having to borrow items from reception instead.

Meta’s decision to fire staff it accuses last week of abusing their benefits came as bosses launched a new restructuring plan that would involve laying off and moving staff from its WhatsApp and Instagram divisions and its augmented reality business , Reality Labs.

The company has just gone through massive job losses, with Zuckerberg making 21,000 layoffs in 2022 and 2023. Meta employed approximately 70,799 employees at the end of June this year.

Meta has been contacted for comment.