VCEC Breaks Food & Beverage Record

Vancouver, BC (March 15, 2007) – Ever held a dinner party for 12? Multiply that effort by more than one thousand – adding in breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks – and you will have experienced 11 days in the life of the catering department at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre (VCEC) in February.

During what is usually a quieter period, the VCEC hosted four consecutive events each with an average of 1,500. In this brief 11 day window, the VCEC generated more food and beverage volume than any month on record over the past twenty years. Staff served 4,260 breakfasts, 9,115 lunches, 12,790 dinners, and 11,300 coffee breaks. The VCEC, which has exclusively featured BC Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) wines for nearly a decade and sells more BC wine than any establishment in the province, served more than 2,600 bottles of wine and 200 dozen bottles of local micro-brew beer.

With nearly 300 full and part time employees on staff, the team worked nearly 400 hours of overtime during this period including 56 cooks and three sous chefs who kept the kitchen going 19 hours per day.

“Our team worked miracles to make these events highly successful,” said Andrew Pollard, Director of Food & Beverage at the VCEC. “This kind of volume truly benefits BC’s economy, from our local workforce to our primary usage of regional goods and services.”

Pollard acknowledges that the newly expanded VCEC with its 10,000 sq ft kitchen – combined with the current building’s 6,000 sq ft kitchen – will be much better equipped to handle such massive food and beverage production.

“Our present facility is designed to produce about a third of what we accomplished with very little staging space, which meant we had to serve meals from the loading dock up three floors to the ballroom,” said Pollard. “With expansion, the kitchen will be right next to the ballroom, which will allow us to serve large groups very easily.”

“Food quality is a very tricky thing with a group this size, but the VCEC’s excellent staff were able to deliver both the quality and quantity of food needed to please even the most demanding palates,” said ITA Group meeting planner Judi Smith, based in Des Moines, Idaho. Smith was the team leader for a three-day sales conference that included seven functions over four days with up to 1,600 attendees.

Also during this record period, VCEC staff served up 700 pounds of Alberta strip loin, 5,373 portions of beef tenderloin, half a ton of BC Hothouse peppers, 92 cases of BC shiitake and oyster mushrooms, and 1,450 Atlantic lobsters. VCEC’s in-house pastry chef produced 9,000 breakfast pastries and 22,000 desserts. All of this was served by 145 banquet servers and attendants who set hundreds of tables and folded 27,000 linen napkins.

About the VCEC
Since opening in 1987, the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre has been British Columbia’s flagship convention facility — hosting more than 300 events and 600,000 delegate days each year, and generating more than $210 million in annual economic benefits. When its major new expansion completes, the VCEC will offer a combined total of nearly 500,000 square feet of function space and will serve as the international media and broadcast centre for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in 2010.

-30-