Food catering stats for cruise ships are insane: ▫️Top 3 cruise lines (Royal Caribbean, Carnival, Norwegian) spend $2.5B a year on food ▫️The largest ships (5x Titanic) serves 100,000 meals a day for 7,600 passengers and 2,300 crew ▫️Ingredients for a week-long cruise are $1.5m including 25,000 line items, 15,000 lobster tails and 400 tonnes of bottled water (ships serve about 15,000 lbs of protein a day) ▫️Each passenger has allotment of >10 meals a day (“A running joke in the cruise-ship industry is that passengers gain a pound a day,” per The Economist) To control costs and reduce waste, cruise ships use special software (Crunchtime) to estimate meals that can be exact as “we need 1,422 portions of calamari tonight”. There are over 300 chefs (~13% of entire crew): “They work seven days a week for the entire length of their contracts, which sometimes last as long as eight months. The chefs are usually from emerging markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia, India and South Africa.” The way one chef describes the job of catering on a cruise ship: “I always say that the captain is the brain of the ship. The chief engineer is the heart of the ship. We are the blood. *** Full read from The Economist here: economist.com/interactive/chri...…