Even if they don’t entirely agree on what football is, the Americans and the British both know how sports are important. And they agree that when they are watching sport, they like to eat.

By Chris Farnell

Anyone who says that sport is nothing but a game clearly doesn’t have a grasp on the numbers involved. Centerplate is one of the largest catering companies in the world. This year alone it has catered the Super Bowl, Pro Bowl and Vancouver Olympics. With a potential 40 million customers going through its sports venues, Centerplate is in no doubt that sports catering is a very serious business.

Just ask Bob Pascal, Centerplate’s Senior Vice President of marketing.

“My goal is to improve the ‘magic’ of a sports entertainment experience through implementing programs with a fan-centric, analytical approach,” he says.

Magic isn’t a word that gets bandied about in the business world very often, but Pascal isn’t alone.

Steve Smith is the Catering General Manager for celebrity chef and Norwich City Football Club owner Delia Smith’s Canary Catering.

Smith is proud to say that he’s born and bred in Norwich, but worked in the catering departments of high end hotels around the UK before being offered a chance to work for Delia at the football club he’d always loved.

“It was a great opportunity, I was really excited by the thought. It was a chance to pair something that I love with something I enjoy doing,” Smith tells us.

A GAME OF TWO HALVES
As with every opportunity, Smith found that the world of sports catering also came with its own unique challenges.

“In hotels, we always talk in terms of time,” Smith explains. “Businessmen want to have their breakfast and get out on the road early- customers want to have their dinner as quickly as possible so they can retire to their rooms.”

Working for Delia’s Canary Catering took it to a whole new level.

“Here we have kick-off time, and that doesn’t move for anyone or anything!” Smith says. “And again, half-time is an immoveable object when you need to sell as much as you can. I’ve never appreciated time as much as when I worked here.”

Pascal is quick to agree.

“Transaction time is critical,” he says. “Especially given the intensity of certain times of the game, like half-time.”

As well as time, there are also space problems. Norwich City Football Club has seating for 25,000 people, and if they all wanted food and drink at half time, there is no way Delia’s Canary Catering would be able to reach them all. So Smith is constantly looking for new ways to reach his customers.

“If they’re not going to come to us we have to go to them,” Smith says. “We have trolleys adapted, and we’ve got four people going around the perimeter track at half time selling hot drinks, sweets and crisps to supporters, but that’s only on the ground level.”

It’s a world away from the practices at American stadiums.

“At a baseball match or an American football match you have people going around selling hot dogs, drinks, you name it,” Smith says. “They have a fantastic system, but they have the space and time to do it, we don’t have that. If you tried that here someone would say ‘Get out of my way, you’re spoiling my view!’”

FAN-TASTIC
Pascal also puts a great deal of effort into finding the best ways to reach his customers.

“We conduct deep fan research to uncover unique insights into fan consumer behavior ,” he explains. “In addition to overall fan perceptions and attitudes about food and beverage services in sports venues, we’ve made key findings that relate to price elasticity, demand curves during games, and regression analyses of key purchasing variables.”

Fundamentally however, the rules of the game never change.

“Football supporters are relatively routine based, so it’s not about getting them here earlier, if we could do that it would be great, but that’s not going to happen,” Smith says. “There is no point trying to change the food we offer either. We’ve tried healthy options, we’ve tried popcorn, we’ve tried sandwiches but football supporters want pies, hot dogs, burgers, chips. So we need to get that to them at a great price for a great product.”

Of course, there is one other thing that you can never forget in the sports catering industry, as Smith explains: “Football takes presence over everything we do and we will never lose sight of that.”

For further information:

Delia’s Canary Catering
http://www.deliascanarycatering.com/

Centerplate
http://www.centerplate.com/