3.5 Million Meals In 16 Days

After catering 13 Olympics since 1968, Aramark has pretty much seen it all—from scrambling to get enough staff for the Atlanta Games in 1996 to construction challenges in Athens four years ago. But feeding athletes, staff, and media at the Beijing Games is its toughest challenge yet.

The Philadelphia food-services company is trying to pull off its biggest Olympics while navigating the particular challenges of doing business in China. The sheer scale of the project is just the start: close to 20 million servings of rice to prepare, 743,000 potatoes to peel, and a million-plus apples to scrub in the process of serving up to 10,000 people per hour. Add in the challenges of haphazard food distribution and the difficulty of finding Western staples like cheese. China's reputation for using high levels of pesticides and hormones in food production also has many athletes looking to avoid any food that's locally grown—putting more pressure on Aramark to prove the dishes it serves are perfectly safe. "It is a high-risk operation for us," says Aramark Chief Executive Officer Joseph Neubauer, whose company has spent the past two years in Beijing preparing for the 16-day event.