There are a few numbers that stand out when you read about Abela & Co. Fifty is one of them, with the company celebrating its half-century milestone next year. One hundred thousand is another — Abela produces this staggering number of meals each day — and then there is 40,000, which is the volume in tonnes of beef Abela actually gets through each month.
Catering on such a massive scale is not for the faint hearted, especially if you operate in a region like the Middle East where the vast majority of food is imported from other continents.
Abela & Co corporate chef Colin Campbell, told Caterer Middle East all about the challenges involved in feeding a small army of blue and white collar workers, hotel staff, hospital patients and students every single day — starting with just how Abela get its hands on such huge amounts of raw ingredients.
“For the most part, as a result of volumes, we are dealing with the bigger and more established suppliers in the market. We are inclined to stay with our tried and tested suppliers, partly because we are buying 220 to 230 tonnes of rice for production a month,” he says, explaining that when you’re buying in bulk, you cannot afford to take any chances and risk a major supply chain upset.
“Ballpark figure for the amount of chicken we need over a six-month period is 8,000 tonnes and for beef it’s actually about 40,000 tonnes every month, so a supplier needs the logistics and infrastructure in place to meet our needs. We have had relationships with suppliers over many years. It’s a well-oiled machine, and in my eight years here we have never hit a huge hiccup that could not be managed easily with a contingency plan. It’s a pretty smooth operation,” he reveals.
This smooth operation sees 3,200 Abela employees working towards keeping more than 100 clients from various sectors, such as healthcare, education and the corporate world, happy.
Campbell tells me that about 40% of the 100,000 meals produced each day are cooked in Abela’s four central kitchens — two in Dubai, one in Abu Dhabi and the newest one in Fujairah — while the rest are cooked on clients’ premises.
“For example, we cook everything for Ikea and the American Hospital on site, and the same is true for all of the schools and colleges, and a lot of the corporates, we work with. Our kitchens are for those clients who don’t have their own kitchens we can use; we feed the staff of about 30 hotels in Dubai so we need to cook that food in our kitchens,” Campbell shares.
Keeping the menu fresh and exciting for the thousands of people who are eating Abela’s food daily while sticking to the client’s budget must be extremely difficult, I venture.
“If you look at Michelangelo painting the Sistine chapel, he probably didn’t have carte blanch but his canvas was large and he had resources, so his creativity was probably quite unlimited. The same is true for us — while our creativity is unlimited, there is the reality of the external and very real factors of price and contracts. If my budget is X amount, while I may want to use a bit of wild salmon, for instance, it’s not going to happen if nobody is paying for it,” he replies.
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