Whatever your yacht size, and however it's used, the biggest challenge can be budgeting and provisioning efficiently.
We spoke to a head chefs who are crew on private and charter vessels, on how they cater for owners, charterers and crew, with a sometimes limited budget.
High-end budget
Chef: Darren Goodwin
Crew: 70
Budget: 460,000 (18 per day per crew member)
The quantity of food needed each week is huge. You can't just go to the local market and pop a tonne of fruit and vegetables and dairy products in the back of the crew car each week. It is necessary to source everything from a provisioner, who can make sure you get everything that you need, when you need it and wherever you are. This comes at a price but is most certainly required.
Satisfy every appetite
There's an issue of keeping 70 people from over 20 nations happy every day. To tackle this, meal times require a larger quantity of food. You need two to three main courses, soups, selections of side dishes, salads and desserts, all served as a buffet. There has to be enough to make sure everyone can have some, so there are always leftovers.
Managing waste
We won't shamelessly throw everything away, not just because of the cost, but because it is a waste. Serving back food to the crew is a delicate situation if it looks like yesterday's food they won't touch it. But if you prepare something nice, more crew will thank you than did the day before.
A lamb stew can be strained and made into Cornish pasties; seafood risotto can be made into arancini balls, fried and served with a spicy tomato sauce. We use what we can a second time anything left after that is wastage.
Spot the difference: private and charter
A private yacht sees a lot fewer guests in a year than a busy charter yacht, so the regular re-stocking of guest provisions, and the option of using and eating the remaining guest provisions isn't there as a regular backup.
The crew of a private yacht also has a lot more time on its hands and tends to spend more time eating snacks. The need for a relatively greater budget on a larger private yacht than on a smaller busy charter yacht is apparent, and both are manageable in their own environments.
Get involved or use a management company?
From low- to high-end, overall budgets can range from $33,000 a year up to 460,000 a year. How much the owner of a yacht is involved with such figures varies massively. Management companies are there to advise and control these things.
Any yacht owner will be aware of the staggering difference in the cost of running small to large yachts and how much difference chartering their yacht can make, compared to keeping it solely for personal use.
Medium budget
Chef: Lindsay Wilson
Crew: 13
Budget: 57,000 (12 per day per crew member)
We don't have a budget for catering for the owner and his guests, but I have not had a complaint regarding cost to date. They are the ones to make special requests, and are aware of the costs and the possibility of a reasonable amount of excess. We limit wastage, although it's not possible to eliminate it totally. We keep it to a minimum with clever recycling and not over-catering in the first place.
Crew budgeting
My crew budget is about 12 per person per day for food, beverages and snacks. This is achievable with planning, good use of ingredients and thrifty provisioning. The crew don't often get fillet steak and lobster, but there are good cuts of meat, fresh vegetables, fruit and fresh fish.
During the season crew food is often subsidised by guests and owners, as there are usable guest leftovers and items requested in provisioning sheets but never used.
Charters
For a charter I prepare for as many situations as possible, so there are often leftover items, paid for by guests and used for the crew. It's not a problem as guests always take priority, and it is only when items are beyond acceptable serving date to guests that this food is recycled and used for crew.
Medium budget
Chef: Brennan Dates
Crew: 25
Budget: $156,000 (20 per day per crew member)
We have a budget of just under 13,000 a month to spend on food for 20 to 25 crew members (about 20/day) that includes lunch and dinner seven days a week, with dessert and hot breakfasts offered every other day.
The budget is fair, considering how expensive all the goods are where we are tied up. We are able to get decent cuts of meats and seafood and stay within the budget.
Our management company provides a spreadsheet that we submit purchase orders through. The captain also has us fill out a daily budgeting spreadsheet for all galley expenses. This adds up all transactions and gives us an updated percentage of the surplus budget for the month.
Organising the food
We order fruit, vegetables, dairy and proteins about every ten days. There is very little carry-over product from one week to the next. This helps keep us on track for each month rather than doing huge orders that would need to be estimated and divided over a couple of months.
Find the right source
Location plays a huge role in what you can buy. We are wintering in Italy, and buy locally rather than paying shipping costs from the UK. The meat in Italy isn't great, so most of our meat is from France, a slightly better option.
We serve at least one meat and a seafood option for lunch and dinner. The seafood locally is expensive. The quality is amazing, but it's hard to fork over money to support an industry with dwindling stocks. We need to stop buying local unsustainable seafood so it can recover.
Serving what people want
Leftover owner and charter stock can pad your budget with the finer things in life. I get the best quality ingredients I can find locally. Sometimes this isn't enough to impress our well-read and food-oriented clientele. This means you must have a varied, well stocked freezer to get through a season.
The crew can help out
When the summer winds down and you still have freezer stock left, the crew get the spoils during the crossing/yard period. It's absolutely transparent, with owners knowing the crew help them make room for a fresh freezer restock.
Charters
Charters are different, as you walk a line between having everything to please your guests, but not using all the advance provisioning allowance (APA) for truffles and caviar. I have worked for an owner who would take an inventory of our freezer at the end of each charter so he could save a few dollars on his next trip.
Low budget
Chef: Stuart
Crew: 12
Budget: 43,000 (10 per day per crew member)
Because of the nature of our business, costs are a lot higher than in the restaurant trade we need companies to sort out all our paperwork and certificates to ship food worldwide, which costs a great deal.
Crew costs
I work on a very small budget, but that does not mean the crew don't eat fillet of beef, sea bass and lobster sometimes. We get a lot of leftover charter food, which goes straight to the crew after each charter. I budget for 10 per head per day, not including drinks and snacks.
When it comes to guest provisioning I generally like to spend 130-150 per head, per day. Sometimes clients will specify cheaper meats, so the costs would then come down.
Obviously, if the client or boss wants expensive things like wagyu beef, caviarand white truffles, these costs go up, along with the freight costs because of where these provisions come from.
Originally published: March 2012
Mark Sims