ARA gears up for Olympic feeding marathon

LOS ANGELES--ARA Services has begun a dramatic Olympic countdown to July 14, when meal service begins is one of the largest contract-feeding marathons ever.

As official provider of food and transportation services to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, ARA is gearing up to serve more than one million meals to some 12,000 international athletes and coaches, and some 45,000 Olympic committee staffers during a month-long stay in southern California.

For its part in what's being described as the largest peace-time event in history, ARA's current Olympics staff of 15 executives will also be mobilizing some 3,000 temporary food-service employees in what's shaping up to be one of the most far-ranging--yet briefest--personnel recruitment efforts ever attempted.

Some quantifiers help put ARA's Olympic challenge in perspective:

* The company's shopping list includes 470,000 lb. of meat--the equivalent of 1,000 grade A steers; 42,500 gal. of milk; 250 tons of fresh fruit; 103,500 loavers of bread.

* Each and every meal served at a total of nine different facilities in the residential Olympic villages will offer four hot entrees, two hot vegetables, dishes of pasta, rice and potatoes, a 14-item "California" salad bar, two kinds of soup (East Europeans and others prefer soup for breakfast), fresh fruit and cheeses. One dining facility at each village will operate around the clock.

* ARA will transport athletes from the three Olympic villages to over 50 competition and practice sites in a five-county, 2,200-sq.-mile area, where as many as 20,000 3-1/2-lb. box lunches (euphemistically called "venue meals") will be served each day.

* The company's 500-bus transportation fleet, supported by 1,300 drivers, mechanics and managers, is expected to travel more than 2.5 million miles and consume more than 416,000 gallons of fuel.

* The food to be dished up from July 14 through Aug. 15 (overlapping and including the actual competition of July 29-Aug. 12) will be the equivalent of feeding dinner each night for two weeks to all 44,850 residents of Bismark, N.D., or equal to serving one meal to each resident of Delaware and Vermont.

But ARA's built-in Olympic clientele doesn't necessarily translate to gold-medal profits for the diversified, $3 billion-a-year Philadelphia-based contractor.

"We're not going to make a killing on this," says Faye Clarke, ARA vice president and general manager of Los Angeles Olympic food services. She says that as one of 31 official sponsors of the first Olympiad ever conducted without public funding, ARA is already financially exposed to the tune of at least $4 million.

The value of ARA's nonprofit contract and the variety of cost parameters involved are subjects not being discussed by the company. But having the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for its client certainly won't hurt the company's reputation, even if the contract doesn't provide ARA with its usual margins.

"We certainly hope our efforts in the Games will increase our name recognition and benefit the corporation," Clarke explained. She adds that ARA felt a certain obligation and responsibility to help with the Los Angeles Games, since its past Olympic experience includes nine other Olympic Games extending back to the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City.

Clarke herself gained experience in ARA's two most recent similar efforts--the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia in February and last year's Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela.

Planning for ARA's Herculean task this summer began in September 1982. Working under ARA leisure services group president John Dee, vp and gm Clarke has had overall responsibility for the Olympics contract, including food planning, purchasing, production, hiring, training and operations.

Food-service operations personnel report directly to ARA's Los Angeles Olympics operations vp, Jacques Theraube, Clarke's principal assistant.

Theraube's familiarity with the Los Angeles market may be of some help in his logistical planning (he was named 1981 Restaurateur of the Year by the L.A. Restaurant Writers Assn. for his work as the Los Angeles-based gm of ARA's Davre's division, operator of Francois' restaurant downtown).

But the Olympics menu and grocery list largely precludes the kind of purchasing which might be done by a white table-clother like Francois'.

ARA originally intended to do much of its own food buying. But as the magnitude of the undertaking became clear, the company turned to the official Olympic food supplier, locally based Vons Markets, for purchasing and warehousing of most food supplies according to strict ARA specifications. (Some of the ARA's shopping list is being filled by food donations to the L.A.O.O.C.)

"We have the same concerns for cost, and we watch the committee's money, just as if it were our own," says Clarke, a 15-year veteran ARA administrator. "We use the same controls as if we were in a profit-making mode."

The L.A.O.O.C. has worked continually with ARA on approval of menus and budgets, "very much like a client situation in our normal markets," Clarke explains, "with maybe more monitoring involved than ordinarily."

Among the many food items ARA is purchasing, baked goods are one of the fe not coming through the Vons organization and not being prepared directly by ARA kitchens. ARA will subcontract locally for the 10 different kinds of breads, rolls and pastries the athletes will eat.

Otherwise, ARA cooks will use facilities at the three Olympic villages to prepare almost all hot and cold dishes. Villages will be set up on the campuses of the University of Southern California, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, where existing kitchen/dining facilities will be used.

Additionally, a two-story dining/kitchin building on the USC campus is now under construction for use during the Olympics (to revert to University use following the Games.)

A single off-site kitchen in Exposition Hall, adjacent to the Shrine Auditorium near USC, will be the principal roasting and baking facility for the main Olympic village on the USC campus, which is directly adjacent to the Coliseum/Exposition Park headquarters for track & field events. (Swimming competitions, will be held on the USC campus in a new pool built with donations from another official sponsor, McDonald's Corp.)

The world's foremost amateur athletes will be eating carefully devised menus, designed to provide about 5,000 calories a day, and sufficient variety to keep their appetites hearty. Using information compiled from the nine previous Olympic Games it has catered, ARA has come up with menus offering conventional foodstuffs and more exotic offerings, including those ethnic foods "that are practical to present," says Clarke.

"A dish like Kim Chee [a Korean pickled cabbage delicacy] is easy to serve in southern California; if we were in North Dakota it would be another matter."

Offered, too, will be American ethnic items such as Philadelphia cheese steak sandwiches and hotdogs--which will serve to satisfy the curiosity of first-time visitors to these shores.

Nutritional requirements are an overriding concern for ARA menu specialists. Since breakfast will always be either a training or precompetition meal for someone, ARA will be offering not only the breakfast soups favored by East Europeans, but also fish, steak and pasta dishes. For those athletes whose schedules call for caloric intake of odd hours, the round-the-clock facility at each Olympic village will enable someone to get a complete meal at, say, 3 a.m.

The so-called "venue meals," made up of a large deli-style sandwich, cheese or pate, bread or crackers, pudding, fresh fruit and nuts (and the Olympics' "official" candy bar-product), are designed to provide 2,500 calories. They will be provided for all athletes who must remain at a remote competition site for over four hours.

In the three months remaining before the kickoff of Olympic month, ARA Services will fill the close to 3,000 jobs necessary to round out its food-service and transportation team. Three personnel representatives are coordinating the activities of four ARA recruitment centers (in East Los Angeles, Westwood, Central Los Angeles and Long Beach) where applicants are being screened.

Planning sessions at ARA's Olympic headquarters in Westwood are shifting from menu concerns to other details, with specialists among the company's 15 core executives working on such problems as warehousing, transportation containers, equipment and a recently assumed responsibility--the operation of coffee houses and discos on the "Main Streets" of each village.

Other planners are getting down to plotting a typical minute-by-minute day for each village, adjusting the layouts to handle anticipated traffic flow and other contingencies.

Because athletes will not be required to eat all their meals at the village where they reside, the possibility of shifts in transient athlete populations putting strains on teh food resources and inventories of other villages and even sites could be "one of our biggest challenges," says Clarke. Reallocation of food stocks would be virtually impossible, she says, in the midt of the swirl of Olympic activities (not to mention Los-Angeles's freeway traffic and immense geographical spread involved.)

However, ARA's objective is to "plan well enough for the predictable so that we can take care of the unexpected," Clarke says.

COPYRIGHT 1984 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group