Chef interview: Colin Campbell

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.

The conundrum of innovation versus budget clearly makes for a careful balancing act.

“Any chef faces the same issue of getting the best that you can with the budget he has. It’s a challenge but at the same time there’s beauty in that challenge when you’re taking a cheaper cut of meat and asking yourself how you can cook it in such a way to get the best out of that meat. Our daily challenge is always to make the very best with what we have. It’s a balancing act between quality, consistency and variety traded against price, and that always becomes a bit of a paradox.

“Great infrastructure, and the resources and manpower needed to do a good job come at a price but a lot of our sector mostly cares about the bottom line.”

Keeping the menu varied and having fun with trying out new ideas is even more important when you are feeding the same people day in, day out.

“Most of us are in a position where we can choose where we want to eat at any time — we have that luxury — but a lot of people we’re catering for have breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same place. As a result of budget or where they work, they don’t have the ability to pop out and get anything they fancy. We literally have to keep it interesting for the same client; the same people might be eating our food for several years because we have had contracts for 10 or 15 years,” he explains.

There is the added challenge as well of some of the sectors Abela supplies having a further need for food that can be considered healthy, including hospitals and schools. The company has looked at the possibility of using organic produce and Campbell reports that Abela is always open to exploring new ideas, though ultimately this approach does not fit the mass catering model.

“Abela has an enquiring mind generally and we are prepared to look, but there is always that commercial side. At the end of the day, it’s a business. Sustainability is a noble venture, as is the whole ‘farm to table’ organic, biodynamic concept. It’s wonderful but the prices are not practical. It’s unrealistic [on a mass scale],” he laments.

Continuing, he adds: “Take the hotel sector, which is one of our biggest clients: there’s a need for healthy dishes and we look at providing those but there is also a need to provide dishes by nationality. A diet rich in soy sauce has a lot of sodium but if I leave the soy out, then it’s not going to work well. Similarly, Indian food uses ghee. Pakistani food, to some extent, has more oil to carry the flavour.

“So, you have to consider the dietary and flavour profiles of specific countries. Filipinos like pork with fat — we don’t go near pork — but it's a good example of the reality of that diet.”

Ultimately, when you are running a business, it comes down to giving people what they want and keeping the client happy. Campbell tells Caterer Middle East that he has to balance the numbers in terms of trying to make a high percentage happy. He concedes: “You want them all to be happy, of course, but people are people and not everyone has exactly the same tastes.”

Another major difficulty associated with mass catering is that companies like Abela cannot transform their offering in the same way restaurants might. As he phrases it: “There’s no closing down for a revamp for us, followed by the grand reopening. Large scale catering is a different environment compared with the conventional.”

Moving onto the challenge of maintaining high food safety standards when so many people's wellbeing is at stake, Campbell says: “Abela has made huge inroads in this respect, starting a decade ago when our kitchen in Al Awir [Dubai] was the first central kitchen to be HACCP-certified. The company as a whole, looking at the means and methods of production, has focused heavily on TQM (total quality management) and we have a quality manager who is one of the best [in the business], who has made huge strides. We have scaled up over time and now we have about eight people working in food safety. I’d say Abela has invested significantly in this area.”

Indeed, Abela & Co has gone a step further than most, by achieving the recognition to be an approved Food Safety Training Centre under Highfield Awarding Center for Compliance (HABC). This means the company is able to provide accredited food safety training internally.

Commenting on this accomplishment, Campbell says: “Being certified to train within the company, rather than outsource training, demonstrates our overall commitment to standards. There is extensive training and refresher training [for employees]. A great deal of resources goes into ensuring standards are where they need to be. It’s the nature of the business – it’s what we do — but it’s a measure of the integrity of the company that its committed to that kind of investment to ensure we deliver a good product.”

With this in mind, I ask Campbell how he feels about the mass catering playing field becoming more competitive, particularly in the run up to Expo 2020.

“Abela is committed to what we do and I don’t see us taking any shortcuts [despite competition]. We will weather any storm and we have stood the test of time, being around for nearly 50 years. Right now there are smaller companies coming in and I say ‘good luck to them’ but will they stand the test of time without making the investments [that Abela makes]?

“We have gone through various transitions and we have a long, very rich history. We aren’t going anywhere and in 2015 we actually had four people here celebrating 40 years working at Abela. That is pretty impressive, more so in this day and age — the global average used to be four years staying at a company and it’s probably even less now.”

Returning to the topic of Expo 2020, Campbell believes that hosting the event “shows Dubai’s commitment to making the city one of the greatest in the world; a city made by and for the 21st century”.

Elaborating, he says caterers that want to profit from the event have a lot to live up to: “Expo is a showcase and you want companies involved that mirror its image of technology, sustainability and quality — companies need to make the effort to meet that vision. A lot of smaller players in large-scale, bulk catering will come into the market, probably from 2017, trying to chip away.

“It’ll be interesting to see what’s going to happen after 2020. [For us] getting to the top of the hill is not easy and staying on top of the hill is tougher, but it’s the nature of the business.”

Campbell describes the growing interest in being involved in Expo 2020 as “a few badgers wanting to take a chunk out of the tree”, which represents some competition for the “six or seven” big players in bulk-catering. However, he notes Abela has “a solid foundation” that will stand it in good stead.

Undoubtedly, Campbell has seen competitors come and go, having joined Abela as executive chef eight years ago, and he concedes that “there is always going to be someone cheaper”, adding that compromise can lead to diluting your core offering.

“Everyone remembers 2008; it was a watershed moment and since then the market has become a lot more competitive. There are more players; the number of big players has remained fairly constant but there are all of the smaller players now.

“Abela has continued to consolidate and we are more committed than ever to quality, CSR, hygiene and the environment. We are actively engaged, rather than just being a caterer,” he continues, confident that Abela's position won't be compromised by increased competition.

In this vein, the company started Abela Learning and Development Academy (ALDA), which Campbell says covers topics such as marketing, finance, IT and English, and Chef’s Academy.

He tells me the latter was founded to help Abela’s junior chefs learn different cooking techniques across various types of cuisines.

“We wanted to give people a base foundation about sauces, ingredients, cooking and different cuisines, and eventually, we developed a book of study material. It’s not about trying to make people into master chefs but, as a company, it’s important to us to make people understand processes; to teach people about food and traceability, and the history [of cooking], explaining why tenderloin is so expensive, for example.

“We want them to understand what cut of meat is best suited to what kind of cooking and about all the different cooking methods. It’s a seven-month course of practical and theory. We invite everyone in the company to do it; we’re a food industry, so why shouldn’t our receptionist know about the industry she works in? The choice is there. People talk about from farm to table and the same applies here, from front to back,” he explains.

Asked about the future of Abela and how the landscape of F&B in the region, as well as bulk catering, could develop, Campbell concludes: “Mass catering and contract corporate catering is not going away anytime soon, especially as more and more people come to the region, leading up to Expo 2020. The model works, so we’re not going to be trying to reinvent the wheel — we’ll be looking to strengthen that wheel and the company as a whole.”