How a Cruise Ship Makes 30k Meals Every Day [video]
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It may be "The Walmart of Cruising" but we always have fun and meet new people on Carnival for a very reasonable cost.
And plus, if I go on vacation, I’d rather explore, than be stuck on a boat for 7 days.
Plus some people like to just relax and for example take the time to read a book on vacation and aren't looking to explore.
Of course, this is my experience of cruises around Europe, where there's a lot of interesting ports clustered closely together. The experience is probably pretty different otherwise.
People are especially wasteful when the food is 'free' and plentiful. If you watch waiters that are removing plates during a typical cruise ship meal many/most contain uneaten portions.
Which is why some all-you-can-eat restaurants have started charging for uneaten food that's ordered but left on the plate i.e. sushi places especially.
Lunch and on some lines for dinner perhaps, but the line I've often travelled on you have the executive chef walking round at dinner and inspecting the returned plates to assess the quantities remaining (and whether any dishes perform better than others).
It's the buffet that has the potential for greater waste, but you often see them rotate leftovers for a couple of days.
They're certainly not great, but I've seen greater per-person waste in hotel breakfasts (or basically any free buffet scenario as you say).
You simply can't optimize beyond a certain level because you need room to absorb changes in customer demand. You can't not serve soup on Thursday because the customers ate all your beef Wednesday and you have no stock.
Fresh fruits and vegetables have a high water weight, while being relatively calorically-sparse.
The total seems high to me, but it'd be interesting to see the breakdown.
Nine pounds of food and drink, including packaging, pallets, skins, peels and bones. Doesn't sound all that far-fetched.
Does that mean they need to freeze lots of the seafood? Is the food less fresh by Day 6 and 7?
The phase reset on a cruise has the intended effect of re-supplying the fresh(ish) lobsters but with the unfortunate side-effect of dropping you off at the shore.
Supply management is important to a cruise line. They are very good at getting the best prices. They take advantage of the ship moving to get the best prices.
https://www.cruisewatch.com/top-10/ships-passenger-crew-rati...
EDIT: But we can do better than that! The Oasis-class of ships are the only ones with a ~6600 passenger capacity, and they of course all have wikipedia pages [1]. And that lists the crew at 2200, for a ratio of 0.33.
0: https://www.cruisewatch.com/cruise-ships/caribbean-princess/...
Harmony of the Seas can handle almost 5500 passengers and 2400 crew.
How many meals does the average tech employee eat at work per day? My initial guess would be around 1.5, with the biggest meal of the day, dinner, usually being eaten outside of work. That would mean google spends more than twice as much per meal than cruises do.
(not complaining - food was fine - just noticeable).
Think the issue in part is that you can't exactly go hungry. So there is a peasant tier buffet included.
It's fine...just a "lots of pasta & skimped on meat" type vibe
"Cooking Breakfast for 1,500 on a US Navy Ship" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywZevdHW5bQ
"24 Hours as a Navy Ship Line Cook" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFh6bJIHl2Y
There must be spreadsheets somewhere with all of the ingredients broken down, costs, quantities, and probably cubic volume occupied (since freezer space and food storage space is somewhat at a premium).
A lot of the docs on large naval ships cover this - modern marvels has a good episode on it too.
Apparently this isn't restricted to the modern era either, I've read that the german u-boat fleets of the world wars had the best food in their military too.
German uboat staff were treated like heroes in Germany, but that was partly their success in nearly amputating Britain from her colonies, and partly from boosterism by Admiral Karl Donitz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_D%C3%B6nitz
IIRC, he said he'd win against Britain with 300 subs, but initially only got about 100.
Morale is a huge issue on boomers and subs, which patrol for months at a stretch, generally submerged the entire time (the whole idea being for your adversary to not know where you are). Crap food on top of the isolation and lack of outdoor exposure fares poorly (so to speak).
Fresh produce is limited to the first week or so of cruise AFAIU, but preserved/frozen and dry goods are available for the duration. I don't know if there's any fresh-grow possible, though there've been experiments.
(General information, no direct experience.)
Some sources:
"Everything you wanted to know about food on a US submarine" https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a147643...
"Sub Grub Is Navy’s Five-Star Secret" (2003) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jan-18-fi-subma...
"US navy researchers conduct tests to grow vegetables on submarines" (2016) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/06/vegetable-ga...
For submarine crew, the balance between "eating home food" vs. "nutritional sufficiency" may swing the balance, though I'd argue that something (sprouts) is better than nothing (frozen / canned vegetables).
Crops which could be grown in conditions in which power is abundant (nukes!) as is water, and atmosphere could be controlled (high CO2 via redirected scrubbers), but space is highly constrained, becomes an interesting question. Probably not trellis or tree crops, though lettuce/greens, carrots, possibly cruciferous vegetables and onions, possibly.
How much use of fermented vegetables is made would be another interesting question.
I can't tell if "reading materials" is a euphemism for pornography or not but I'm guessing probably.
That's an interesting article though, I never thought about it before.
I'd love to see this industry reformed.
Cruise ships can also avoid having to report or even really investigate cruise ship deaths or disappearances. Ken Carver is one of the only people on the planet currently pushing to investigate and hold cruise companies accountable for deaths and missing persons.
Everyone I know says that all programmers and managers need to read TMMM, but any time I've brought up any part of that book other than Brooks's Law, I've been immediately shot down. According to every coworker and manager I've had, this book is a classic of the field -- yet apparently has all of one useful sentence between its covers.
For a while I was paring with someone where we did take on more of a surgical team model that worked quite well. The other guy was the c++ and domain expert cranking out code and I was the unix, git, etc expert and acting as the toolmaker and "magic spell" provider.
That said, in a real surgical team some of members make considerably more money than the others so I doubt we'll see it take off in our industry.
Is that not already the case with software development teams?