When you eat at a UC Berkeley dining hall, have you ever wondered how CalDining manages the impossible feat of serving food to about 28,000 people every day? We had the same question and went behind the scenes of CalDining to find an answer. We spoke to Christopher Henning, the executive director of CalDining; Sean O’Donnell, executive chef of Café 3; and Melvin Garcia, general manager of Café 3 and Bear Market, and toured the Café 3 kitchen.
To get a sense of scale for the amount of food that is consumed at Café 3, the dining hall serves an average of 200 pounds of chicken breast per day and 100 pounds of salad per meal. Of course, all of these ingredients need to be stored somewhere. Café 3 stores all of its food on a separate floor below the kitchen. These massive storage units are filled up with an average of $18,000 worth of food every morning and get emptied out by the end of the day.
Health & Sustainability
When it comes to ingredients, chefs try to source healthy, organic, and local produce. CalDining’s partnerships with well-regarded sustainable companies such as Mary’s Chicken and Hodo Soy help ensure that meals are both tasty and environmentally responsible. It should also be noted that CalDining claims to have never used powdered eggs or powdered potatoes and hopes to raise more awareness about where its ingredients are sourced. CalDining is constantly setting new sustainability goals, including aims to exceed purchasing 20% local and reduce carbon emissions from food import.
The environment is a priority for CalDining. As a partner of ‘Menus of Change,’CalDining encourages ‘plant-forward’ cooking to offer more sustainable meal options. The chefs are also committed to serving only sustainable seafood based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide. To ensure that cooking practices are following environmentally friendly guidelines, the kitchen is audited every week by the Sustainability Team on campus. In terms of waste, CalDining is partnered with Cal Zero Waste to ensure that all single-use items and packaging in the dining halls are compostable.
CalDining also has to manage pre-consumer and post-consumer food waste. Any usable leftover ingredients in the kitchen are donated to food shelters, leaving behind minimal pre-consumer waste. One way that CalDining tries to reduce post-consumer waste is by encouraging customers to be more conscious of its food waste and serving smaller portions. Still, about six compost bins are filled per meal.
Aside from dining halls, CalDining is also responsible for convenience stores like Bear Market and the Den. A vast majority of the items in these stores are externally sourced with the exception of some wraps and parfaits, which are made daily in the kitchen. Some of the best-selling items in Bear Market include bananas, water, and cookies. By strategically positioning its products in the store, CalDining tries to encourage students to make healthier options; for example, sugary drinks are placed further in the back of the store.
Inclusivity
CalDining also strives to make its food inclusive by providing kosher and halal options. Café 3 has a kosher-specific deli bar and a corresponding kosher kitchen, which is strictly regulated to follow Jewish practices. All of the cooking equipment in the kosher kitchen is kept apart from the rest of the kitchen and washed separately. Also, since Jewish law states that dairy and meat can never be combined at any point, the entire kitchen is kept dairy free.
The chefs try to cook up a variety of dishes from different cultures and aspire to do so with as much authenticity as possible. Chef O'Donnell believes that authenticity is incredibly important but also challenging–getting it right helps celebrate a culture, but messing it up can insult a culture. One example of this is when the dining halls served a traditional Korean dish called bibimbap. No matter how hard they tried, the chefs weren’t able to recreate bibimbap with enough authenticity, leading them to remove it completely from the menu.
Planning and Preparation
Menus are planned out two weeks in advance of service, allowing sufficient time for delivery. One part of menu-planning is estimating the right amount of food to cook for a meal to reduce food waste. By keeping a record of the amount of leftovers for each dish at the end of every meal service, the chefs can approximate how much of the dish to make in the future to meet the demand exactly.
Surprisingly, only three chefs are needed in the Café 3 kitchen at a time during a meal period. This is because almost all of the food has been prepped in the previous meal period or throughout the day, so all that’s left to do is cooking. During a meal period, some staff may be grilling chicken for the grill bar or deep-frying french fries as demanded, but most of the staff will already be preparing for the next meal.
When it comes to physically cooking the food, chefs have to use super-sized kitchenware. At Café 3, the chefs use a specially-insulated 60-gallon pot for stews and broths. Cooking such large quantities of food is also challenging because chefs have to follow recipes with extreme precision, as small errors become more significant on a larger scale. Sometimes, plans can go awry due to missed deliveries or other unexpected issues and chefs need to improvise. On one occasion, Chef O'Donnell prepared 100 pounds of homemade cheese to improve a dish that the chef didn't think was cheesy enough.
As per every service, there is so much that goes on under the surface that a consumer hardly sees, and CalDining is no exception. While the dining halls may seem like a well-oiled machine, they are indeed ran by passionate individuals who work hard to get you the food you need.