As competition from restaurants and flat-screen TVs grows, stadium caterers in the US are looking to seriously up their game. If you want to know why, then take sports fan Bob Smith as an example, who goes to watch his favourite American football team on a Saturday in March. Halfway through the game, he feels hungry and heads to the catering shack where he buys a delicious vegan burger for his wife, a freshly cooked salmon steak sandwich for himself and a couple of smoothies.
He is typical of the change in taste taking place among punters turning up to watch live sport in the US, and it’s a trend that we could well be seeing more of in the UK.
American stadium fare is increasingly non-traditional as catering companies recognise the demands of their patrons and try to offer something for everyone.
This is especially true at the brand new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, home to the San Francisco 49ers, an American football team. Opened last August, the stadium has approximately 68,500 seats and 170 luxury suites, not to mention more than 700 food and beverage units, ranging from fast-food-type stands to sit-down restaurants and upscale catering.
The volume of the food offered is not unusual in the US – it’s what’s being dished up that’s the surprise. Caterer Centerplate has promised it will offer at least one vegan dish at each food unit, and that almost a quarter of all food served will be vegetarian or vegan.
On top of this, the Greenville, South Carolina-based caterer is using ingredients connected with all the buzzwords of today: the food is local, with 70% of ingredients sourced from within the state of California; sustainable, as all seafood is from managed fisheries; and eco-conscious, with all cooking oil recycled, and all packaging and cutlery recyclable, compostable or biodegradable.
Centerplate tried not to follow traditional formulas when developing the menu at Levi’s Stadium. None of the vegan food contains tofu, for example, which is often the prototypical ingredient of this type of food.
“We really wanted to focus on making the food more interesting and making each of these vegan items taste as good as the non-vegan items, especially making sure the texture of the proteins was as flavourful as the non-vegan food,” says general manager Zach Hensley.
Vegan dishes include a jackfruit sandwich – smoked then braised jackfruit, an enormous Asian fruit, served with apple-jalapeno coleslaw and home-made barbecue sauce; ribollita, a Tuscan vegetable stew with Arborio rice and kale; and a nopales torta, a layered sandwich made with nopales, a type of cactus.
“It was important to make our food interesting with local food, and to put a spin on it and be ambitious about what we’re doing,” Hensley says, explaining that Centerplate wanted to reflect the diversity of foods in the San Francisco region.
To develop the menu, Centerplate delved into the local food scene and sourced recipes for some of the area’s specialties, including fresh bao buns – Chinese-origin steamed and filled small bread buns – curries and tortas. The latter is a Mexican sandwich with layers, such as a black bean layer, a protein layer and a pico de gallo layer (a type of salsa), all encased between two pieces of crusty bread.
But alongside all this are the delicacies we all expect to find: hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, chips and garlic fries, another local speciality. Even this, says Hensley, is made from high-quality ingredients such as fresh custom-ground grass-fed beef and 100% sustainable seafood.
Hensley says these foods are actually the biggest hits, constituting 55% of sales, but the others do well, especially the barbecue dishes, such as a pulled-pork sandwich and a free-range-chicken sandwich, curries such as tikka masala, and ribollita, a hearty meat or vegetarian soup from Tuscany.
Centerplate’s plan for the food served here was so integral to the stadium that it was built around it, with infrastructure designed to enable the caterer’s vision.
The equipment the catering company uses includes pizza ovens, rotisseries and steam-jacket kettles. The 11 wood-fired pizza ovens are dotted throughout the stadium, and at 2,200lbs each, these are so big that the concession stands have been built around them. However, given that around 60% of the food is cooked on demand, this equipment was necessary.
Centerplate may well be blazing a trail when it comes to stadium food, but it’s not alone. Other contractors are also responding to the requests of consumers and the competition stadia face.
Sodexo is the number-one provider of stadium food at colleges in the US and has close to 50 stadium accounts.
“What’s growing are gluten-free requests and allergies – the latter, especially peanuts, are becoming a more widespread concern for folks,” says Jerry Grefer, district manager for Sodexo Sports and Leisure.
Sodexo is also moving more towards local branding – working with popular local restaurants to bring their brands into the stadium.
“It is a chance for the customer to buy up, and to get the experience they could get at a sports bar or at home, and that’s key,” explains Grefer. “Since stadia are fighting off competition – the 50in TV in people’s homes, and restaurants – we lower the decision point whether to come to the game or not by serving great food.”
Sodexo offers a variety of healthy fare because customers ask for it.
“However,” he says, “many people’s diets go out of the window when they walk through our doors. Not because of our offerings, but because they’ve decided they are going to come and have a good time.”
Traditional food and beverages constitute around 80% of sales at Sodexo’s stadiums. However, more people ask for better food ever year, he says, and Sodexo makes it easy to find at each stadium, with maps of which dishes to find where, and mentions on scoreboards as well as social media.
He tries to keep the healthier and allergen-free food priced in the same range as the regular food.
“The cost to us is about 10% more, but we try to keep it comparable so the folks with that special need don’t feel they’re paying a premium.”
Americans looking to expand their culinary repertoire may well find themselves heading to a sporting event in coming years as it increasingly becomes a dining and viewing experience all in one.
