Marissa Mayer brings free food to Yahoo

How is new CEO Marissa Mayer going to revitalize Yahoo?

By making it more like Google, the company she just left.

According to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Mayer has instituted a few changes already at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, CA, headquarters. Among them: establishing a weekly all-hands meeting on Friday afternoons, and making all the food in its URLs Cafe, which previously priced egg white muffin sandwiches at $3.65 and teriyaki chicken paninis at $5.31, free.

Of course, it’s easy to say that all of this has been borrowed directly from Google, but these kinds of offerings have become standard at many Silicon Valley offices — the fact that Yahoo has, until now, lacked them has likely been a sore point for some of its engineers. Both Facebook and Twitter, for instance, serve up free snacks and daily catered meals to employees.

They’re small changes, yes, but they’re likely to improve the morale of a company whose public image and internal image has deteriorated over the last seven years.

In addition to the new meeting and food policy, Swisher reports that Mayer is also planning “major changes” to workspaces “to make [them] more collaborative and cool,” and improving the swag offered in its stores. She’s also pushing to improve Yahoo’s core products, including e-mail, Flickr and search.

Several of Swisher’s sources said that “big splash tech or product deals… perhaps via an acquisition” may be announced “in the days ahead.”

Yahoo could not be reached for comment.