An integral part of any event is, of course, the food! At EMBL, we’ve got an incredible Food Services Team who take care of our cafeteria, canteen, and event catering needs. We spoke to Viktor Schmidt, Catering and Service Coordinator, about the transition back to on-site events after the extended COVID-19 pandemic break.

How have the last 2 years been for you and your team?

It was a big challenge for us and yet also an opportunity to make changes.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we had full warehouses and cold stores in preparation for the upcoming event year. When the canteen had to close due to the pandemic, we quickly processed and froze everything we could, but unfortunately, we couldn’t save everything.

In order to reopen, certain precautions had to be implemented, especially in the canteen. We came up with the concept that the customers told us what and how much they wanted to have us put on their plate.

This had both negative and positive aspects. On the one hand it was quite exhausting, because we were separated from the customer by a plexiglass screen, constantly in front of the heated buffet, and we all had to wear masks. This often led to misunderstandings – also due to the background noise of 5 cooks trying to listen to 5 customers at the same time. On the other hand, this also made us get to know our customers better, and after a while we knew who had which preference and could therefore respond faster to their wishes. In addition, it gave us the possibility to be a little bit creative in arranging the plates nicely!

How do you feel now that everything is slowly “going back to normal”?

It seems to me that, after the lockdowns and everything, people appreciate social events and gatherings much more and smile more often. Now that everything is becoming more or less normal, it’s also so nice to see familiar faces again, or to meet new colleagues who joined during COVID-19 times.

Amongst the kitchen staff, you can really feel that the break we had to take during lockdown just made us more united – we were really looking forward to coming back to work and enjoying the social contact in our team!

Were there any surprises or differences from before?

Many things are back to the way they were before, but of course we also still have COVID-19 regulations in place. The way we greet each other has changed – in the past we might have shaken hands or hugged, but now everything is a bit more contactless, just like paying.

The first in-person conference after the extended COVID-19 break took place in March 2022. What was it like for you and your team to organise the catering back on site? How did it work out and were you excited?

Since we had to stop all catering due to the pandemic, we used the opportunity to restructure ourselves a bit and take time to do the work that had previously fallen by the wayside, such as paperwork, inventory, and other things.

We were all thrilled when it became clear that events would come back on site! We looked forward to catering again and got in touch with internal departments and external suppliers. It was so nice to collaborate again and felt so freeing after the mandatory pandemic break.

We quickly realised we were a bit out of practice, but we soon remembered the many steps that were necessary in the process and so we overcame any insecurity we felt in the beginning. Cooking large amounts of food wasn’t necessary during the lockdown, so it’s great to finally be able to prepare dishes and desserts in a scale we couldn’t before, for example our very popular mud pie!