Madinat Jumeirah's Sebastian Nohse tells the chefs that at his resort, the discount voucher system is a useful tool.
How would you describe the F&B supplier market at present?
Jean-Luc Morcellet: When we are talking about product, everyday [I need] to keep the same standard of product to make sure that I don’t miss out on orders. Because I don’t like to have to say we are out of stock of something. This is not acceptable. This is a big job because with all these openings, suppliers are starting to be stretched more and more. For example, Argentinean meat is very hard to get. Luckily now there is another Argentinean restaurant, Gaucho, so now the supplier has more to work with. Otherwise they give up if they only have one restaurant to supply because they have to do so much work to get that meat into the country. We almost had a big problem with Argentinean meat, and we were lucky that we always keep a lot of stock. The suppliers said in December that they couldn’t send anything from Argentina to Dubai, because everything was sold in Europe. Because Europe is the first market for them, they make most money there so they send everything there. Here it is still a small market for suppliers.
Frank Noack: I totally agree. First I lived in Europe and Germany, and there are suppliers everywhere and then I went to Africa where I had to set up my own supply, then I came to Dubai where I thought it would be a wide market like in Europe, I was shocked. First of all there are very few very good suppliers. It is not very wide, which is moving the price in the wrong direction. The variety is just not there. Obviously I realised that nothing is really produced here, and everything has to be flown in, and we are moving the market because they can meet our demands as long as the demand is there. I had the same challenge at trying to get Latin America meat. But finally after six months we found a supplier. But it was quite a challenge and still is. Sebastian Nohse: The problem for me is not variety, because if you push hard enough as chefs you get whatever you want. The problem for me is the quality of what arrives here and the inconsistency of what we receive on a daily basis.
Sudqi Naddaf: Dubai has all the Asian products, Middle Eastern, European products and American products. I’ve never seen that before because it’s not available anywhere else.
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What other issues do you find with the supply chain in the UAE?
Sebastian Nohse: There are too many suppliers, and they all only have little things. They don’t specialise. They supply everything and nothing. There are four or five suppliers in Dubai that know what they are doing.
Frank Noack: It’s a patchwork of suppliers coming in with only 15-20 products. In Europe you will be able, even with your back-up suppliers, to get by with 14-15 suppliers and you can get pretty much everything you need. Here, you have to run around 50 suppliers, more or less.
Sebastien Castelot: Sometimes they don’t even know what they are selling. They are selling food like they are selling shoes or a t-shirt.
Marco de Wildt: In Holland I had four suppliers and here, 40-50. If you look at meat, the more varied cuts are very hard to get here; there are only the prime cuts.
Jean-Luc Morcellet: I don’t know how many suppliers of beef in this town. And smoked salmon and olive oil, I’m sick of olive oil.
David Miras: I was going to say about olive oil. In this town, no matter who the supplier is, before they leave they all try and sell you a bottle of olive oil and I don’t understand it.
Frank Noack: There are certain products where they have a larger margin where they can earn, like olive oil.
Sebastien Castelot: Somebody tried to sell me frozen smoked salmon; unbelievable rubbish.
What’s the solution to these issues?
Sebastian Nohse: Every month we meet with all the Jumeirah executive chefs in Dubai and we have a CAM project, which is a centralised purchasing project, where we then select with our purchasing team certain products and lock them in for six months. So we can guarantee quality and the best price available on the market. It used to be that this was structured by purchasing, and they would just select the best price on the market. Now it’s lucky that we have very involved executive chefs at Jumeirah and we meet once a month with the purchasing team. We have a yearly structure plan which is for our top 25 items, for example beef, we partner with a farm in Australia, we lock it in for all six hotels and then we specify our aging procedure because with beef that is a challenging thing. So we are lucky that we are locked in with our main suppliers, for things like olive oil, which I agree can be a tiring process. However, we’ve managed to lock that into a six-month contract. Our dairy products are all locked in. The chocolate that we use in all our pastries is locked in. So there are ways that you can make the system work, if you have volume and if you have the right structure and focus on it from a company perspective.
Jean-Luc Morcellet: If you have volume you can play with so many things — from the importation to the price. At least the supplier knows they have this volume so it is good for them as well. It’s very important to look after the good suppliers, not to order too late, there has to be a good partnership with a supplier where you help each other out.
Sudqi Naddaf: Our purchasing manager is out of this world, everything we want we can get.
Sebastien Castelot: But does he really know the product? Have you ever seen a purchasing manager based here in Dubai who knows what he is talking about — all he knows is the numbers?
Sudqi Naddaf: That is why we are both there. At Kempinski we have a centralised purchasing office which is called Kempinski Trading. They have a VP that is based here in Dubai. He purchases here in Dubai and supplies us here as well as our hotels in Europe. I asked for beef and they organised me a trip to the States and Australia. I was able to choose the cut I wanted, the age I wanted, and organise the delivery on a standing order. But then we also have to agree on a group level for the emirates. For example, Emirates Palace, the Dubai properties and Ajman, we are all able to agree on the challenging products so that we never have problems.
Frank Noack: We started setting up a similar system a year ago. But it has challenges as well. Even having a contract, supply can go up and down because of the seasons. And then rubbish turns up on your receiving bay that is not of the agreed quality. And it can still be a day’s work to patrol that.
Sebastian Nohse: We can break our contract at any time. If the quality and price commitment changes they know we won’t stand for it. It’s still hard work every month for all the executive chefs to meet, and we’re in constant email contact when we have challenges on our loading docks. For example, when we’ve committed on tomatoes from a certain supplier for six months, and we’re having quality issues, we all know about that immediately when it hits our loading docks. So then we change, we have a back-up supplier, and when the supplier knows that we’re prepared to do that then they make sure they deliver.
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