Students can feast like Olympic champions any day of the week, courtesy of University Dining Services.
Compass Catering, the same company that owns Chartwells and provides dining services for the University, was the official catering supplier of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. Compass is an international catering service who has catered events for the PGA Tour, Wimbledon and the Oscars.
Executive Chef Pat Hannan and University Dining Services Director Mike Paulus, recalled their experience catering the 2002 Games.
“We ended up feeding 1.9 million people in 16 days,” Paulus said. “Because it was February and 9/11 happened only four months earlier, the boxed lunches we made had to be shipped to a warehouse for X- ray security checks.”
In 2001, Paulus was the Chartwells logistics director at the University of Utah. He said he was notified four months before the Olympics arrived in Salt Lake City.
“It was a long process for Compass to book the Olympics,” Paulus said. “The Olympic committee had housing facilities built on campus for the athletes that are now residence halls at the University of Utah. There were so many people in Salt Lake that Chartwells had to build a temporary dining facility for the students to eat.”
The temporary dining facility was a six-story heated tent equipped with a full-serviced McDonald’s and seating capacity for more than 1,000 people. Chartwells provided breakfast, lunch and dinner, seven days a week during the Olympics. Over 350 Compass employees flew to Utah to help prepare 457,748 boxed lunches in 16 days. With a lot of people to feed and limited room for food storage, semi-trucks were converted into portable freezers.
“We built plywood docks and Sysco semi-trucks became freezers,” Hannan said. “We had trucks that would pull up to a dock on a side of a mountain. They had to have security checks at every venue, so that was something not many catering companies have to deal with in the Olympics.”
And Chartwells didn’t only provide services to the athletes and the attendants, but they also fed the FBI, CIA and President Bush.
“The Olympic village was nothing but a chain link fence with barb wire fences and M-16s every sixteen feet,” Paulus said. “Bush flew on to campus and to see the snipers on top of the buildings was surreal.”
Hannan was the corporate chef for Chartwells during the Olympics and shared his experience feeding the president’s secret service men.
“We were closing up shop and getting ready to go home when all the sudden, eight men in black came around the corner,” Hannan said. “One of the guys came up to me, armed and as intimidating as you can be and said ‘Do you know where we can get a hot dog or something?’ So I made up some dogs and chili and we sat there and swapped stories while we were all sitting on milk crates.”
Sophomore Elizabeth Brooker said it isn’t surprising Chartwells catered the Olympics.
“If the Olympics approves of the same food we have on campus, then it must be good,” Brooker said. “I didn’t know that Chartwells was as well-known as they are and honestly it doesn’t surprise me. I like the food way better than last year.”
While Compass’ reputation was already worldwide before the Olympics, the publicity the company received outweighed the financial benefits.
“Just to say you catered the Olympics is a major publicity move in itself,” Paulus said. “We really didn’t capitalize too much on the overall revenue we received, but just the experience was something I’ll never forget.”