The numbers Games
The Commonwealth Games begin today, and the biggest single sports event contract in UK catering history has gone to Sodexho. Amanda Marcus meets the team putting things together behind the scenes.
The World Cup and Wimbledon may now be distant memories, but the frenzy of summer sport in Britain is far from over. This week, Manchester plays host to the largest one-off sporting event ever held in the UK, the 2002 Commonwealth Games. From 25 July to 4 August, about one million visitors and nearly 6,000 athletes from 72 countries will descend on the city. And Sodexho UK will be there to feed them, in the biggest single sporting contract in UK catering history.
The contract for the games was put out to tender last year and split into three parts: sponsors and corporate hospitality, Sportcity (public catering at Manchester Stadium), and the Athletes Village. Sodexho Prestige won the first bid last July (Caterer, 15 November, page 22) then won the public concession a few weeks later. At the end of last year, it won the final contract to cater for the Athletes Village. Put together, all three are worth £8.5m in turnover.
Russell Haddon, regional director for Sodexho Prestige and games-wide director, is the man charged with overseeing the operation, while operations director Claire Martin will run the day-to-day logistics. Haddon is delighted that his company beat off the competition for the whole job, but is especially proud to have won the final bid, the Athletes Village, worth around £4m in turnover on a fixed-cost basis.
"We knew we could do it all, but we hadn't run the Athletes Village in Sydney so this was a coup," he says. (The company ran public catering in Stadium Australia and corporate hospitality at the last Olympics, in Sydney). "This was the most difficult part of the tender. The specifications and logistics are very complicated. Everything has been worked out to a very strict budget and everything is included - water, power, toilets, kitchens, some security, you name it."
Venue manager Norman Atkin-Smith has been working on the project for almost a year. He will be joined by food and beverage manager Paul Burton, who will be in charge of food ordering and logistics, having run the catering operation for Sodexho in the Athletes Village at the World Student Games in Sheffield in 1992. Food production manager Andi Redwood is head chef and in charge of menu planning and food production.
Together, they have the job of catering for some of the world's most lauded athletes. Lunch alone will require as many as 40 different main courses, and Haddon anticipates that his team will be serving around 18,000 meals per day for a month (some athletes and support staff will be on-site from 10 July, and the whole structure will be taken down on 14 August). The self-service restaurant can seat as many as 2,000 people at any one time, and will be open around the clock, with pre-breakfast offers up and running by 4am.
"Some athletes eat at 2am so they can warm up and train before competing first thing in the morning," says Haddon. "While all the elements you'd expect will be on the menu, such as high-energy pastas, the funny thing is that the athletes eat the same as you and me."
The choice, though, is immense and will cater for every combination of diet - all the meat will be halal, and kosher food is being brought in from a specialist kosher kitchen. Options will include vegan, lactose-free, gluten-free, low-sodium, lacto-vegetarian and piscarian (for vegetarians who eat fish).
In addition, every single item will be comprehensively labelled to inform the consumer of its exact content, from energy value and carbohydrate content to protein content and portion size.
Sodexho's sports nutritionist, Raffaella Piovesan, has spent the past few months calculating the nutritional value of every item of food to be served. The information was sent to the client's nutritionist for double-checking and then to various international competing teams for their approval (there'll be no cheating on the calories at this venue). Every service area will have its own supervisor who will check that all the pre-printed labels are accurate and up to date, and the menu cycle will change every eight days.
A second quirk of the site is getting the numbers right. In the first three days, around one-third of the athletes will have been knocked out of the competitions. The elite are likely to pack up and head for their next venue, while the not-so-elite will probably stay and "maybe dig into steak and chips", according to Haddon - but all can stay until the end of the games.
"We don't know for sure," says Haddon, "but we're drawing on previous experience of these events and anticipating a build-up before the event, peaking in the first few days then fluctuating through the games as some athletes prepare for an event and others wind down. We work out when the individual events are, how many are competing, when they're due back at the village and take it from there."
While the athletes are fuelling up in their village, more than one million spectators will be coming to watch them perform over the 10 days. Success number two for Haddon and his team was winning the public concession, which is on a commission basis.
Several venues around Manchester will be hosting individual events, but the main action will be at Sportcity, containing brand new buildings for squash, table tennis and, the centrepiece, a new 38,000-seater stadium which will be handed over to Manchester City FC after the event.
Because of that handover, all the public catering structures are temporary and, as a result, Sodexho's offer to the public is restricted by health and safety standards to exclude any cooking which requires ventilation. As a result, the main offering will be pizzas, hot dogs, pies, pastas and sandwiches, as well as a range of drinks, ice-creams and snacks.
There are 17 separate sporting sessions, each expected to attract around 33,000 visitors, with changeover at 4-4.30pm daily, so Sodexho is expecting around 66,000 people to pass through Sportcity each day. It has built 21 temporary outlets inside the compound and is licensed to run bars all day. Investment in temporary equipment which the company cannot recover after the event is estimated at around £170,000.
Chris Torley is in charge of the logistics and will have some 30 trucks parked on-site, storing several days' supply of hot and cold drinks, ice-creams and snacks, so as to minimise deliveries during the event, but all suppliers are on 24-hour standby if, for example, a sudden heat wave means demand for ice-cream soars, or cold weather means tea sales rise above estimates. "We don't intend to run out of anything," says Haddon.
He knows that one of the logistical problems in a stadium of this size is the inevitable peaks and troughs of demand when the kiosks will get "rushed". He says: "It can seem like a ghost town when a main event is on, then the event finishes, you hear a cheer, and thousands of people get up to look for refreshment."
To take some of the pressure off the kiosks, the company will have around 80 hawkers walking around in the stadium bowl selling snacks and drinks, which Haddon says worked "superbly well" in a trial run last month.
Sponsors and corporate hospitality was the first bid to be won, and is now headed by Sue Creed, who normally runs events at Henley and Tatton Park for Sodexho. She now has 19 core sponsors to look after, double the original estimate, and is offering 93 different hospitality packages costing from £220 to £495 per person for the opening ceremony, most of which are already sold.
Is Haddon nervous? "Not really," he says. "You only need to be nervous if you haven't planned properly, and I've been working on this since 1999, when we first started talking to the games committee. I'm looking for-ward to it." n
Commonwealth Games 2002
The biggest multi-sport event ever held in Britain.
6,000 athletes will eat 18,000 meals per day.
72 nations will compete in 17 sports.
One million spectators are expected in Manchester, and one billion people in 100 countries will watch on TV.
Projected consumption in the public stadium:
Pringle's snacks: 24,000
Canned drinks: 630,000
Ice-creams: 480,000 (depending on weather)
Hot dogs: 30,000
Pizza slices: 15,000
Cadbury's chocolate pieces:
72,000
Savoury and meat pies:
144,000
Teas/coffees: 300,000
- Projected consumption in the Athletes Village:
40,000 bananas
65,000 muesli bars
750,000 tea bags
20kg goat meat
107,000 oranges
7,500kg rice
5,600kg pasta
5,000kg carrots
80,000 sausages
55,000 jacket potatoes
And so to bed…
The Athletes Village site has been purpose-built on two rugby pitches within the grounds of Manchester University, where competitors will be housed in student accommodation.
Sodexho's Healthcare Division has won the £350,000 contract to supply the athletes' laundry facilities. Some 6,000 duvets have been made, embroidered with the Commonwealth Games logo, which will be given to the athletes as a gift at the end of their stays. A total of 50,000 new towels and 22,000 sheets will be loaned to the games and reused in Sodexho hospital contracts afterwards.
Help required, but not just anyone
Sodexho is bringing in around 1,200 temporary staff for the Commonwealth Games, and more than 100 Manchester City Council employees, under the watchful eye of human resources manager Kaila Bell, who runs the company's recruitment Web site, www.prestigepeople.co.uk.
This is no mean feat in itself, but the games has the added complication of being classed as a high-security event. This means that anyone with access to the games site - in all, more than 2,500 staff, managers and suppliers - must be accredited.
All staff, from Sodexho's senior managers to toilet cleaners, must submit their personal details, a photo and three references to Bell's team.
The information is checked, and the staff member has to turn up in public to be verified against his or her photo before a pass is issued.
At the venues, everyone, the public included, will be subject to a security search, similar to the precautions carried out at airports.
Temporary staff are being offered a minimum of £5 per hour, depending on the job, for daily shifts of eight to 10 hours.
"The only condition is that people must commit themselves for the full fortnight," Bell says. "It's all or nothing."
Sodexho Prestige
Manor House, Manor Farm Road, Alperton, Middlesex HA0 1BN
Tel: 020 8566 9222
Games-wide director: Russell Haddon
Operations director: Claire Martin
Human resources manager: Kaila Bell
Site director, Athletes Village: Norman Atkin-Smith
Manager, Sportscity public catering: Steve Hegarty
Head of sponsors and corporate hospitality: Sue Creed
Client liaison manager: Richard Burtt
Account manager: Mike Harvey
Purchasing manager: Danny Elsom
General manager, laundries: David Conway
