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A day in the life of a Provision Master

Where are the two pallets of lemons?!

Oh hi, sorry, I didn't realize that you were already here. My name is Kamil Korchinski, originally from Poland, but now with a Canadian Passport. Nice to meet you and I am looking forward to spending the day with you. Welcome to my kingdom, the provision area.

As you can see, today things are a little hectic, we are in our turn-around port and besides the new guests coming on board, we also have the delivery of all food and beverage items. Since we come to Miami every 7 days, this is pretty straight forward..... however sometimes we still have to look for this and that – like for the pallets of lemons!

As provision master, I am responsible for having all the necessary food items on board What we need depends on the menu, on any specialty dishes we have to prepare and of course the crew needs to have something to eat as well.

A day in the life of a Provision Master

Along with the Executive Chef and the Hotel Controller, we deal with the weekly, bi-weekly and monthly orders. While the ordering is not done by me, I have to store all items in the various freezers and fridges, the dry store and in the fruit and vegetable cold rooms. Together with the Hotel Controller, I make sure we receive everything on the delivery note and that the meat, fish, fruits, vegetables and dry goods are in good condition, and the fresh produce is truly fresh.

I have a team of 7, two Assistant Provision Masters and five Provision Utilities. Besides making sure all the fridges and freezers are working properly and holding the correct temperatures, the areas must always be clean, and the food is stored in the correct way. As you can see, we hold the key to the entire provision area.

If anyone needs any items from here, they need to fill out a requisition form, which needs to be signed by the department head. This requisition is then received by us, we prepare the boxes and trolleys and mark the exact amount of what is given out. The one picking up the food items must check and sign that they have approved this on the receipt.

One of my main jobs is to update the computer with what has been handed out. Since we also log all the incoming goods, we have at anytime, a current inventory to hand of all items. With this, we can plan ahead for the next order, and see where we can do better and possible use less or more of.

Spot checks are carried out against the inventory on a daily basis and of course the fresh fruits and vegetables need to be checked so that we do not have a rotten apple that would spoil the entire box.

Today the main task is to check all the goods, store them in the right place and in the right order (the items still in the stores need to be moved to the front, the ones arriving today need to be stored in the back)

All this is done with the help of my team, who I am very lucky to have as they really work well.

Ahh and here are our two pallets of lemons that I was looking for, which we have already checked off before they where loaded. Now they can be moved with the help of a pallet-jack to the fruit cold room.

I hope you learned a lot here today, even if it was a little hectic!

Sorry, there are more potatoes arriving so I need to go now and check them out.

Maybe I will see you around another time.

Kamil Korchinski, Canada