Talking about food with someone can lead to very interesting exchanges, including new ideas to prepare right away. But if we scale that to a massive event like an American football game in Michigan, food becomes a fundamental element that mobilizes hundreds of people. With over 100,000 spectators per game, what level of coordination must chefs, cooks, distributors, and vendors achieve?
The Big House is the nickname of the stadium used by the University of Michigan for its American football games. With an official capacity of 107,601 people, it is the largest stadium in the United States, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, and the third largest worldwide. Its "no-show" percentage hovers around 5 points, which means that any game averages 100,000 spectators without much difficulty... spectators who are hungry before the game starts and during halftime. So... how do you feed more than 100,000 people?
Preparing Food for an Event of 100,000 People
This fabulous video published by Business Insider explains that a chef (in this case, executive chef Chris Carr of Sodexo Live) must manage a complete culinary team of 35 cooks. All of his actions are a race against the clock: Work begins 24 hours before the game, coordinating deliveries and starting production.
The chef returns to the stadium at one in the morning the next day, and the process repeats with greater intensity. Fried chicken, eggs, shawarma, tacos... it's impossible not to feel hungry. The pizzas are prepared by a third party, Buddy's Pizza. The video mentions 6,000 pizzas in four hours, which are then baked, cut, and placed in boxes inside the stadium. Still, hot dogs usually dominate the event as the best-selling option (around 10,000 per game).
There are more than 70 kitchens and preparation areas throughout the structure. The goal is to move the merchandise as quickly as possible, which is not easy considering that the stadium is almost a hundred years old, and although the space for spectators grew, the same cannot be said for its insides. With just one tunnel and one elevator, moving the equivalent of a stadium in food requires a lot of patience and effort.
Time limits also translate into limits for their finances. While a restaurant can be open all year, these people only have seven games to make money. The stadium aims to get one million dollars per game just on food and drink (they don't serve alcohol yet). The last phase is cleaning, collection, and analyzing surpluses. This allows the organization to better calibrate its orders, and donate the rest of the food to food banks and other local groups. In fact, there are 200 employees and about 500 volunteers.
