Catering
Immediately after my study at INSEAD I started to work in the Catering industry, a very interesting and demanding business sector. Especially the fact that supplier (the catering company) and client are ‘condemned-to-each-other’ for a protracted and intimate period of time makes this quite an experience: you better be fully transparent and honest from the get-go, or it comes back to haunt you.
I’ve been responsible for camps dotted through-out Saudi Arabia differing in size from 15 to 7.000 mouths to feed, as well as for a complete expat-family village hidden in the tropical forest of Gabon.
Still, the most daunting projects were the off-shore oilrigs of the China Coast: in those days (1984-1985) the drilling companies were forced to have a Chinese apprentice for every job on board. This meant not only that the rigs filled far beyond their capacity, but also that we had to provide a much more varied kitchen than normally and this while the kitchen capacity was laid out for half as many as were being serviced. But beating all these inconveniencies was what happened when an oilrig was emptied because of a typhoon.
Not only did I now have to find double the normal onshore housing capacity, but I was held to provide the exact same facilities for our Chinese clients as for our non-Chinese, even though international hotels were very very limited and non-Chinese were not allowed to stay in Chinese hotels. Great Fun !!
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