00:00 Every game day, chefs at the University of Michigan's football stadium
00:06 whip up food for over a hundred thousand hungry fans.
00:09 We named the big house because it is the largest stadium in the US.
00:13 That's Chris Carr. He's in charge of a culinary team
00:18 of 35 cooks. There's an enormous amount of pressure on everybody.
00:23 Horribly stressful. Everything we do is based on time.
00:27 And they have to make every game count.
00:30 You know, a restaurant is open 365 days a year.
00:35 We have to make all our money really in seven days.
00:38 The stadium aims to earn a million dollars a game just from food and beverage.
00:42 Game day goes quick. But if you ain't ready, then you'll be a bit behind.
00:46 But that's not easy in a stadium that's almost a century old.
00:51 There's only one concourse and one elevator
00:55 to move an entire game's worth of food.
00:59 No, no, no, no, no. Usually it's about an hour away.
01:03 Here's how chefs race against the clock to feed football's biggest crowd.
01:08 [Cheering]
01:14 We're just 24 hours away from kickoff, and this is when the action picks up.
01:19 So the goal on a Friday before game day is always that everything is
01:23 ready to roll.
01:26 Deliveries from the main kitchen come in on the service level.
01:30 Chris says this one truck holds as much as $20,000 worth of food.
01:36 I'm sure he's got multiple pallets coming in.
01:39 So it never stops. We just keep on going.
01:43 On a Friday like this, everyone's job is to get as much cooking done as possible.
01:51 You don't want to have to walk in on game day and then do a whole lot of
01:54 production. You just want to just go, go, go.
01:59 In one area, they're setting up veggie platters and prepping salads.
02:02 So stuff that can't sit for a long period of time without
02:06 being compromised.
02:08 They'll grill more hot dogs and burger patties.
02:11 It's quick. If you can do it quick without dumping them all, it works really well.
02:18 I'm always teaching up on game day though, so I'm a game room grade.
02:23 Chris handles salmon rosettes for salads headed to the private suites.
02:27 Can't be done too far in advance. It is fresh fish. You always have to make a
02:30 little bit of spare. So if there's not one that's exactly the
02:34 way I want it to look, I've got ones that I can work with instead.
02:37 Then chefs bring the food to the cooler to load onto carts.
02:40 There he is hiding back there. All right, there's your rosettes.
02:44 This is an organizational nightmare. Each of these carts ends up at one of over
02:49 70 kitchens and prep areas around the stadium.
02:52 So chefs run through checklists. Relish was 11.
02:56 French onion is 9.
02:59 To make sure the right dishes end up on the right cart.
03:03 They also label each cart with the item and quantity.
03:06 That way we know that we've got everything where it's got to be.
03:09 He's getting nervous. He's had 400 carts to build, so.
03:13 I know, right?
03:16 In the main kitchen, hot food gets labeled with a color for each concession
03:20 stand. And then where's the red? The red is
03:24 actually pink. We don't do red here because it's Ohio
03:28 State. They'll move as much as they can on
03:32 Friday before the concourse fills up with fans.
03:36 That way the food's up ready to go. Chris heads out for the day around 6 p.m.
03:42 When we walk into those doors tomorrow morning, they all know
03:46 what's important.
03:49 A couple minutes to one outside the big house.
03:53 Time to fire it all up.
03:56 Chef coming in.
03:59 Chef coming in. I announce myself when I come in.
04:04 The stadium itself will be swept by bomb dogs
04:07 throughout the course of the evening. The last thing you want to do is walk into a
04:11 dark quiet kitchen and start a labound dog.
04:15 All right. Chef Chris turns on all the equipment and runs over the plan for the
04:23 day. Then we walk in on Saturday. All we got
04:26 to do is fire and go. By 3 a.m. his sous chefs start rolling in.
04:32 So far so good. Now we're just moving into the next phases.
04:39 By 8 a.m. they're frying the chicken tenders and they've got to move fast.
04:45 I'll go through 40 cases of chicken tenders each game just for the sweet
04:49 level alone. Chefs also slice up meat for shawarma
04:53 and tacos.
04:56 Just like in the main kitchen, pizza preppers are racing against the clock.
05:05 You can say the challenges of trying to make 6,000 pizzas in
05:10 four hours. Buddy's is one of the stadium's newest vendors.
05:14 Its Detroit style pizzas are made off-site but have to be cooked,
05:19 cut, and boxed in the stadium on game day. Just like the field, right? You got to
05:26 have a green team. We're just trying to go out there and
05:29 put on a good performance.
05:33 Come home with a dub. Buddy's, like every other kitchen in the stadium,
05:39 feels the squeeze from a lack of space.
05:42 The University of Michigan's big house was built in 1927.
05:47 While expansions through the years have added more stands, seats, and towers,
05:52 the bones of the stadium have stayed the same.
05:55 So typically most buildings are going to hold
05:58 50 to 80,000. You're going to have, you know, a 20 percent no-show rate.
06:02 The no-show rate here is maybe five percent, so we're getting over 100,000
06:06 people every single game.
06:09 It makes moving food a nightmare.
06:13 There's only one tunnel to cart food along and only one
06:18 elevator. I've been standing right here for about 30 minutes
06:22 waiting on the elevator. We just stopped on floor five.
06:25 I don't know if they have to get out, you know, for reasons like this, you know. I
06:29 gotta wait for them to stop on their floor and
06:32 then I get off on floor two, so we gotta go back in the elevator
06:35 and push these halfway across the stadium.
06:39 Banquet server Cammon Brennan walks up to six miles a game,
06:42 dropping off food. It's a track he doesn't seem to mind.
06:46 If you got a little bit of spare time, you could take a glimpse at the game, you
06:50 know. I love it though, because I get to watch
06:53 the football game, you know. It's real cool.
06:57 Elevator took like 40 minutes, man. Finally, Cameron drops off his delivery
07:02 upstairs. Well, I guess this is this is where we part ways.
07:06 Go blue, go blue.
07:09 This is the level with all the box suites.
07:17 They come fully stocked with food and drinks.
07:20 So essentially, we get all the food and we bring it up.
07:24 It comes up all nice and wrapped. We'll unwrap it and then as my sweets get here,
07:28 I pull out their cold food and set it out nice for them.
07:32 Sarah Jacobus has been serving the same four box suites since 2014.
07:37 So we've got frittatas. Fruit goes with the beautiful palpeis.
07:44 And then I find that people will eat these more if there's spoons in them, so
07:48 it works out really nice. It's kind of cute.
07:53 It's two hours before kickoff and the
07:57 gates open.
08:00 Once gates open, I begin walking the building.
08:04 That's Michael Jordan, a different Michael Jordan. He works for Sodexo Live,
08:09 the catering company for Michigan Athletics.
08:12 Since the big house has so little room to move inside, Michael set up water
08:16 stations and shipping container food stands
08:18 outside. It's really allowed us to expand our footprint of the stadium.
08:23 The new layout has been a huge success. Total food and drink transactions are up
08:28 over 13 percent from last year, increasing the stadium's revenue by 11 percent.
08:34 Michael says that's thanks in part to simpler menus and a better flow in the
08:37 concourses. Constant communication on walkie
08:41 talkies also helps the team keep the food moving.
08:44 About 100,000 people with cell phones in the area service just
08:47 just kind of drops to nothing. Across the stadium, workers are scooping popcorn out
08:51 of trash cans,
08:54 prepping pretzels, and finishing burgers. There's no playing
08:59 catch up when there's 100,000 people in the building.
09:02 By now, lines are starting to form. We're a really busy stand. I don't know.
09:08 They love it. Hot dogs are the stadium's number one seller.
09:12 It moves about 10,000 of them each game. Concessions move quickly. Servers aim to
09:20 get food to customers in under a minute. Speed helps the culinary team hit its
09:25 million-dollar sales target each game. And that's just in food and
09:30 beverage. We're still not serving alcohol in the
09:33 stadium. This year, the university has one fewer home game.
09:37 That means it's set to miss out on nearly nine million dollars in ticket
09:40 sales, which makes food earnings all the more
09:43 important. New ordering systems have helped speed
09:47 up some concessions. Self-checkout averages just 18 seconds a
09:51 transaction, and it's helped this burger stand
09:53 double sales this year.
09:57 Now it's crunch time. So we'll, about 15 minutes before kickoff,
10:02 will be our first really big push.
10:13 Finally, the action on the field kicks off.
10:18 But the food doesn't stop rolling. And then halftime is is definitely our
10:27 biggest push.
10:30 You're not walking around with this. You're mid. We score a touchdown, boom,
10:35 popcorn goes flying. It's like shooting confetti out, but it's popcorn.
10:40 Michigan pulls off a win against Rutgers, but the Chefs' game day
10:44 isn't over. I tend to hang all the way through to the very bitter end,
10:48 and once it gets to the end of the game, there's no leaving until they're all
10:51 gone. So you're just in it. It's not uncommon for
10:55 staffers to pull 12-hour shifts. I mean, a lot of them are here more than
10:58 they're at home. It's amazing they keep coming back.
11:03 Dempsey, don't smile like that.
11:07 Michael says that's why finding the right team is important.
11:11 Hard to hire 700 people for an event for seven times a year.
11:17 About 500 of these workers are actually volunteers from local charities.
11:22 Cenexo Live donates a percentage of food sales to their causes.
11:26 The catering company pays only about 200 of them,
11:29 including the chefs and servers. They make between $30 and $50 an hour.
11:35 Chris does one final walkthrough of the now quiet suites.
11:38 Well, we've reached three o'clock. For me,
11:41 I'm about 14 hours in on the day. He's assessing waste.
11:48 Chili, they've gone through about half of it.
11:52 The wings are gone. Handful of hot dogs, handful of veggie brats left.
11:59 But when the day is done, the trash can never lies.
12:02 He'll use this info to tweak food ordering for the next game.
12:06 It's a giant stadium, and so you're going to have access.
12:10 Volunteers pack up all the extra food to be donated to local pantries.
12:15 We're in the range of about 5,000 items a game of what they're picking up.
12:21 Then they gear up to come back in a few weeks and do it all over again.
12:27 I mean, I'd mark this one down as probably a solid B+,
12:30 maybe an A-, looking forward to the next three to go.
12:35 [MUSIC]
12:45 [MUSIC]
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