Just how much food and drink do they need for a cruise ?

This is something that totally amazes me just how do they know? Who decides what to order? How do they know how many bottles of wine, bananas, potatoes to order?

I went in the galley of the Queen Mary when I was on a transatlantic cruise and asked the question but this was years ago and from memory, it was done by average they made it sound so easy !!! On a recent Princess documentary on the TV it showed somebody ordering to many tomatoes so they went mad on the menu and had tomato everything, which is something I will look out for on future cruises.

Before you read any further, just a bit of fun why don’t you take our short test now and take a few guesses yourself click on the picture below , I got 6/8 correct

Quiz: How Much Food And Alcohol Does A 7-Night Cruise Really Go Through?

The figures are unbelievable let’s have a look at some stats I have found about Oasis of the seas, one of the worlds largest ships.
On average on a week’s cruise, they need to provide approx 200,000 meals they have about 250 chefs of all different nationalities so each chef makes approx 800 meals a week !!! Wow that’s incredible I’m no chef and being one of my least favourite thing to do hats off to them.

Let’s look at what is ordered on an average 1 week Caribbean cruise on the Oasis. Her main home port would be the day the bulk of the stock arrives for e.g Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Port Canaveral. The staff have 9 hours to load the shopping list for the week, I’m guessing I cannot compare my weekly home shopping delivery to this though!!!
This is an idea of what will be taken onboard …..
3.5 tonnes of rice
5.5 tonnes of flour
30 tonnes of vegetables
Nearly 16 tonnes of cooking oil
25 tonnes of meat including 8 tonnes of chicken and 2 tonnes of bacon
5.5 tonnes of watermelons and nearly 3 tonnes of honeydew melons
4 tonnes of pineapple and 2 tonnes of strawberries
86,000 eggs
4,000 lobster tails weighing in at nearly 900 kilograms
2,780 bottles of wine and champagne
20,000 bottles and cans of beer
15,000 bottles of water

The list above is not endless and it is just to last the week to keep the cruise ship running.
It’s not just about making sure they remember to order everything but at what stage they order certain produce e.g fruit and veg they need to be loaded at various stages of ripeness so that some of the products can be consumed straight away while the remainder can ripen a few days into the voyage. I suppose it’s like us sorting out our fridge when we get our weekly shop. This is some military operation though.

While the shopping list may have given you food for thought, just look at some of the stats below that is consumed daily

450 kilograms of lettuce
9,650 pastries
6,300 bread rolls
1,030 burgers

Are you surprised?
Would you have guessed any different?