PROJECT AFTERLIFE FESTIVAL / BARCELONA / SPAIN


A consultant- manufacturer partnership rose to the challenge of delivering a record-breaking foodservice operation at a Barcelona music festival, reports Tina Nielsen


T


horough preparation, testing and planning was required when Juan Umbert FCSI and his team at Makeat in Barcelona set out to deliver what


would be a record-breaking project: serving 8,500 meals across two days at the techno and house music festival Afterlife, working out of two containers, replacing the 32 classic food trucks normally serving festival goers. But the challenge went beyond the scale.


“Te problem when you bring in 32 food trucks is you have 32 micro-companies, each with its own way of operating. Because you don’t know what you are going to sell, you prepare in different ways and you can run out of stock. If everyone comes at once, you can end up with queues of 30 or 35 minutes just to eat,” says Umbert. “We knew we’d have to respond to the


high pressure, volume and speed of the festival without compromising on quality, security or efficiency.” Te co-founder of the gastronomic


consultancy and innovation studio knew who to call on when it came to making the concept work at scale. He turned to Welbilt’s Fitkitchen, a system built around technology, efficiency and human-centered kitchens, which he had already explored. Te customized solutions can include


a range of equipment depending on requirements – combi ovens, high-speed ovens, fryers, griddles, broilers and induction units – and the watchword is speed. At Afterlife, staff served 16 items every minute and each meal took three minutes to prepare. “It is a new way of understanding


gastronomy,” says Umbert. “Kitchens no


longer have to be heavy, noisy, and stressful – there is a new way where modern kitchens have classical music playing, people speak calmly, there is creativity, there is time. Not everything has to be constant stress.” Before anything, the team set out to understand how food works at festivals. “We studied the data and different festival styles. Some last just one day and people eat maybe once or twice, while others last four days and the challenge is different,” he says. Te Makeat team decided on a


mainstream American-style menu: pizza, wings, chicken burgers, pastrami sandwiches and cheeseburgers: items they could cook and sell easily. “We analyzed more than 250 suppliers and 400 products to find the ones that worked best with the technology and could be prepared quickly,” he explains. “We designed the menu so that


around 25% of the dishes were cooked in the oven, 25% in the Merrychef, 25% in the fryer, and 25% through another process, so that if a huge volume of orders arrived we would never overload one technology.” Before the gates opened, the team pre-


prepared food – pizzas in the oven, burgers in hot holding cabinets – so when the first wave arrived, food could go out immediately. At peak moments, when a DJ finished,


around 1,200 people arrived at once. Te menu was meticulously designed


JUAN UMBERT FCSI CEO AND CO-FOUNDER Makeat


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Festival food, reimagined


and the space mapped out to the millimeter – getting the staffing right would be crucial. “We needed runners to move between storage and the kitchen, people assembling packaging, a kitchen team inside the container, people operating the ovens and fryers, people assembling burgers and pizzas, and people serving at the front,” says Umbert. In total there were 72 workers. Te festival project has led


to an ongoing collaboration between Welbilt and Makeat, highlighting the opportunities that exist for partnerships


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