A man of many services

Says the most affable manager of this large enterprise jointly owned by BWIA and Goddard Enterprises of Barbados: “The existing clients were aware of the changes but the general public at large was unaware of what we do and what this facility was all about.”

On leaving Fatima College, de Gannes went straight into pharmaceutical sales, leading to a stint in Guatemala and Costa Rica before returning home to set up the Glaxo Smith Kline operation in 1995. He is the first to admit: “What I know about management has been learned hands-on and through courses and training I was sent on.”

In 2004, Goddard’s approached him to take over the reins of the Piarco business which had moved from the airport compound in 1995 and was set up with full kitchens. “The airline industry worldwide was going through rough times and they were looking to diversify and grow, and that is the sort of thing I like to do,” said de Gannes. Coming on board, he immediately set about diversifying, setting up separate business segments, branding them, and adding support services for clients, other than food. And this “mover and shaker” plans to continue to diversify and eventually export the company’s services.

Married and a father of two teenagers, de Gannes is kept very busy but thoroughly enjoys what he is doing. In two short years de Gannes knows the business where he has made many changes and improvements, from the “ground up”, as can be seen from his pride in the restaurant and events section which got underway about 18 months ago under his stewardship. “This started with a focus on canteens, but service is now being provided for weddings, and in-house dining and cocktail parties, with a chef and catering from our facility, or preparing the food at the client’s house.

And so what started off in 1974 as Airline Caterers Limited and was run by BWIA and Bel Air as an airline kitchen providing airline meals, is today an operation with three chefs. It is now a business operating round the clock, providing a variety of services to offshore oil and gas platforms as Allied Energy, and restaurants and events services as Allied Caterers, while Katerserv now provides over 4,000 airline meals per day.

And although the company’s base is food, it provides a host of other services for its clients, such as, housekeeping for the men who live on offshore rigs and platforms.

The platform holds up to 60/70 people, and is like a hotel which needs to be cleaned and maintained so that Allied Energy has about 160 staff located offshore. “Recently,” said de Gannes, “ we organised vaccination of off shore staff to prevent the whole platform coming down with chicken pox.”

How does de Gannes manage three companies which were separated so as not to confuse the clients in the different lines of services they would be getting?

“With good people,” was his immediate reply. “My job is to co-ordinate the whole thing and provide a good environment so they are motivated. It was a challenge to diversify and get into new areas and see the skills being used to offer our services. For instance, we offer Medivac services, provide ambulatory services to ensure a person needing to get to the hospital does so with a paramedic in attendance. We provide cargo container units for anything going offshore to a rig, and everything is certified for safety reasons. The company employs a helicopter landing officer who ensures there is no damage to passengers landing on a platform.”

In this very diverse operation, every single detail must be taken into account, things like the weather to ensure that the boat taking things out to the offshore facilities will arrive safely, and refrigerated units to ensure that food will maintain good quality and can withstand the weather.

Very high standards of food quality control are observed explained de Gannes, “We have to be very meticulous in buying raw material and must validate suppliers so we go to the plants and make sure everything is up to our standard.”

“We have to make sure everything is cooked thoroughly to the right temperature and placed in chillers and freezers to minimise the possibility of any sort of bacterial contamination. The first flight leaves at 7 am and that food is in the freezer four hours before departure, and about one hour before the flight leaves those meals are taken to the aircraft and loaded on to the flight, to be warmed up on board and served to the passengers.”

So the next time you pass by the large ochre coloured building with the Katerserv Limited sign on the road to the old Piarco airport, you will have an idea of what the 180 busy staffers located in there, are involved in on a 24-hour basis.