The University of Michigan's Big House is the biggest football stadium in the United States. In secret kitchens, 35 chefs make food for over 100,000 fans. But in a stadium over a century old, moving the food is a logistical nightmare. There's only one tunnel and one service elevator to transport all the food. We caught up with chefs 24 hours before kickoff to see how they cook for football's biggest crowd.
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00:00 Every game day, chefs at the University of Michigan's football stadium
00:06 whip up food for over a hundred thousand hungry fans.
00:09 We named the big house because it is the largest stadium in the US.
00:13 That's Chris Carr. He's in charge of a culinary team
00:18 of 35 cooks. There's an enormous amount of pressure on everybody.
00:23 Horribly stressful. Everything we do is based on time.
00:27 And they have to make every game count.
00:30 You know, a restaurant is open 365 days a year.
00:35 We have to make all our money really in seven days.
00:38 The stadium aims to earn a million dollars a game just from food and beverage.
00:42 Game day goes quick. But if you ain't ready, then you'll be a bit behind.
00:46 But that's not easy in a stadium that's almost a century old.
00:51 There's only one concourse and one elevator
00:55 to move an entire game's worth of food.
00:59 No, no, no, no, no. Usually it's about an hour away.
01:03 Here's how chefs race against the clock to feed football's biggest crowd.
01:08 [Cheering]
01:14 We're just 24 hours away from kickoff, and this is when the action picks up.
01:19 So the goal on a Friday before game day is always that everything is
01:23 ready to roll.
01:26 Deliveries from the main kitchen come in on the service level.
01:30 Chris says this one truck holds as much as $20,000 worth of food.
01:36 I'm sure he's got multiple pallets coming in.
01:39 So it never stops. We just keep on going.
01:43 On a Friday like this, everyone's job is to get as much cooking done as possible.
01:51 You don't want to have to walk in on game day and then do a whole lot of
01:54 production. You just want to just go, go, go.
01:59 In one area, they're setting up veggie platters and prepping salads.
02:02 So stuff that can't sit for a long period of time without
02:06 being compromised.
02:08 They'll grill more hot dogs and burger patties.
02:11 It's quick. If you can do it quick without dumping them all, it works really well.
02:18 I'm always teaching up on game day though, so I'm a game room grade.
02:23 Chris handles salmon rosettes for salads headed to the private suites.
02:27 Can't be done too far in advance. It is fresh fish. You always have to make a
02:30 little bit of spare. So if there's not one that's exactly the
02:34 way I want it to look, I've got ones that I can work with instead.
02:37 Then chefs bring the food to the cooler to load onto carts.
02:40 There he is hiding back there. All right, there's your rosettes.
02:44 This is an organizational nightmare. Each of these carts ends up at one of over
02:49 70 kitchens and prep areas around the stadium.
02:52 So chefs run through checklists. Relish was 11.
02:56 French onion is 9.
02:59 To make sure the right dishes end up on the right cart.
03:03 They also label each cart with the item and quantity.
03:06 That way we know that we've got everything where it's got to be.
03:09 He's getting nervous. He's had 400 carts to build, so.
03:13 I know, right?
03:16 In the main kitchen, hot food gets labeled with a color for each concession
03:20 stand. And then where's the red? The red is
03:24 actually pink. We don't do red here because it's Ohio
03:28 State. They'll move as much as they can on
03:32 Friday before the concourse fills up with fans.
03:36 That way the food's up ready to go. Chris heads out for the day around 6 p.m.
03:42 When we walk into those doors tomorrow morning, they all know
03:46 what's important.
03:49 A couple minutes to one outside the big house.
03:53 Time to fire it all up.
03:56 Chef coming in.
03:59 Chef coming in. I announce myself when I come in.
04:04 The stadium itself will be swept by bomb dogs
04:07 throughout the course of the evening. The last thing you want to do is walk into a
04:11 dark quiet kitchen and start a labound dog.
04:15 All right. Chef Chris turns on all the equipment and runs over the plan for the
04:23 day. Then we walk in on Saturday. All we got
04:26 to do is fire and go. By 3 a.m. his sous chefs start rolling in.
04:32 So far so good. Now we're just moving into the next phases.
04:39 By 8 a.m. they're frying the chicken tenders and they've got to move fast.
04:45 I'll go through 40 cases of chicken tenders each game just for the sweet
04:49 level alone. Chefs also slice up meat for shawarma
04:53 and tacos.
04:56 Just like in the main kitchen, pizza preppers are racing against the clock.
05:05 You can say the challenges of trying to make 6,000 pizzas in
05:10 four hours. Buddy's is one of the stadium's newest vendors.
05:14 Its Detroit style pizzas are made off-site but have to be cooked,
05:19 cut, and boxed in the stadium on game day. Just like the field, right? You got to
05:26 have a green team. We're just trying to go out there and
05:29 put on a good performance.
05:33 Come home with a dub. Buddy's, like every other kitchen in the stadium,
05:39 feels the squeeze from a lack of space.
05:42 The University of Michigan's big house was built in 1927.
05:47 While expansions through the years have added more stands, seats, and towers,
05:52 the bones of the stadium have stayed the same.
05:55 So typically most buildings are going to hold
05:58 50 to 80,000. You're going to have, you know, a 20 percent no-show rate.
06:02 The no-show rate here is maybe five percent, so we're getting over 100,000
06:06 people every single game.
06:09 It makes moving food a nightmare.
06:13 There's only one tunnel to cart food along and only one
06:18 elevator. I've been standing right here for about 30 minutes
06:22 waiting on the elevator. We just stopped on floor five.
06:25 I don't know if they have to get out, you know, for reasons like this, you know. I
06:29 gotta wait for them to stop on their floor and
06:32 then I get off on floor two, so we gotta go back in the elevator
06:35 and push these halfway across the stadium.
06:39 Banquet server Cammon Brennan walks up to six miles a game,
06:42 dropping off food. It's a track he doesn't seem to mind.
06:46 If you got a little bit of spare time, you could take a glimpse at the game, you
06:50 know. I love it though, because I get to watch
06:53 the football game, you know. It's real cool.
06:57 Elevator took like 40 minutes, man. Finally, Cameron drops off his delivery
07:02 upstairs. Well, I guess this is this is where we part ways.
07:06 Go blue, go blue.
07:09 This is the level with all the box suites.
07:17 They come fully stocked with food and drinks.
07:20 So essentially, we get all the food and we bring it up.
07:24 It comes up all nice and wrapped. We'll unwrap it and then as my sweets get here,
07:28 I pull out their cold food and set it out nice for them.
07:32 Sarah Jacobus has been serving the same four box suites since 2014.
07:37 So we've got frittatas. Fruit goes with the beautiful palpeis.
07:44 And then I find that people will eat these more if there's spoons in them, so
07:48 it works out really nice. It's kind of cute.
07:53 It's two hours before kickoff and the
07:57 gates open.
08:00 Once gates open, I begin walking the building.
08:04 That's Michael Jordan, a different Michael Jordan. He works for Sodexo Live,
08:09 the catering company for Michigan Athletics.
08:12 Since the big house has so little room to move inside, Michael set up water
08:16 stations and shipping container food stands
08:18 outside. It's really allowed us to expand our footprint of the stadium.
08:23 The new layout has been a huge success. Total food and drink transactions are up
08:28 over 13 percent from last year, increasing the stadium's revenue by 11 percent.
08:34 Michael says that's thanks in part to simpler menus and a better flow in the
08:37 concourses. Constant communication on walkie
08:41 talkies also helps the team keep the food moving.
08:44 About 100,000 people with cell phones in the area service just
08:47 just kind of drops to nothing. Across the stadium, workers are scooping popcorn out
08:51 of trash cans,
08:54 prepping pretzels, and finishing burgers. There's no playing
08:59 catch up when there's 100,000 people in the building.
09:02 By now, lines are starting to form. We're a really busy stand. I don't know.
09:08 They love it. Hot dogs are the stadium's number one seller.
09:12 It moves about 10,000 of them each game. Concessions move quickly. Servers aim to
09:20 get food to customers in under a minute. Speed helps the culinary team hit its
09:25 million-dollar sales target each game. And that's just in food and
09:30 beverage. We're still not serving alcohol in the
09:33 stadium. This year, the university has one fewer home game.
09:37 That means it's set to miss out on nearly nine million dollars in ticket
09:40 sales, which makes food earnings all the more
09:43 important. New ordering systems have helped speed
09:47 up some concessions. Self-checkout averages just 18 seconds a
09:51 transaction, and it's helped this burger stand
09:53 double sales this year.
09:57 Now it's crunch time. So we'll, about 15 minutes before kickoff,
10:02 will be our first really big push.
10:13 Finally, the action on the field kicks off.
10:18 But the food doesn't stop rolling. And then halftime is is definitely our
10:27 biggest push.
10:30 You're not walking around with this. You're mid. We score a touchdown, boom,
10:35 popcorn goes flying. It's like shooting confetti out, but it's popcorn.
10:40 Michigan pulls off a win against Rutgers, but the Chefs' game day
10:44 isn't over. I tend to hang all the way through to the very bitter end,
10:48 and once it gets to the end of the game, there's no leaving until they're all
10:51 gone. So you're just in it. It's not uncommon for
10:55 staffers to pull 12-hour shifts. I mean, a lot of them are here more than
10:58 they're at home. It's amazing they keep coming back.
11:03 Dempsey, don't smile like that.
11:07 Michael says that's why finding the right team is important.
11:11 Hard to hire 700 people for an event for seven times a year.
11:17 About 500 of these workers are actually volunteers from local charities.
11:22 Cenexo Live donates a percentage of food sales to their causes.
11:26 The catering company pays only about 200 of them,
11:29 including the chefs and servers. They make between $30 and $50 an hour.
11:35 Chris does one final walkthrough of the now quiet suites.
11:38 Well, we've reached three o'clock. For me,
11:41 I'm about 14 hours in on the day. He's assessing waste.
11:48 Chili, they've gone through about half of it.
11:52 The wings are gone. Handful of hot dogs, handful of veggie brats left.
11:59 But when the day is done, the trash can never lies.
12:02 He'll use this info to tweak food ordering for the next game.
12:06 It's a giant stadium, and so you're going to have access.
12:10 Volunteers pack up all the extra food to be donated to local pantries.
12:15 We're in the range of about 5,000 items a game of what they're picking up.
12:21 Then they gear up to come back in a few weeks and do it all over again.
12:27 I mean, I'd mark this one down as probably a solid B+,
12:30 maybe an A-, looking forward to the next three to go.
12:35 [MUSIC]
12:45 [MUSIC]