Actually sounds like a nightmare. Or for a new job for Sisyphus, whom the Greek gods once punished with an impossible task: washing a million dirty knives and forks every night so that they are sparkling clean again the next day for the next use in the festival tents. Who wants to do something like that voluntarily? Pamela and Hannes Gruber from Passau want that, and they are happy to do it with their company Gastro Gast Gruber.
Although – “every night” is wrong. The cutlery for the Oktoberfest tents is actually cleaned and repackaged during the day. What is true is that it is picked up from the Oktoberfest tents every night and brought to Passau in four trucks. The new cutlery, hygienically packed along with the napkin, is already in an interim storage facility in Munich and is delivered to the tents on time every day.
That alone sounds strange enough: the vast majority of festival tents at the Oktoberfest no longer have their own cutlery, but instead have it delivered? And from Passau, 190 kilometers away? Is it really worth it, is it sensible and even sustainable to transport cutlery so far around the area for 6.5 million Oktoberfest visitors every year?
On-site appointment in a factory hall on Tittlinger Straße in Passau-Patriching, a small commercial area in the north of the three-river city. The Gastro Gast company recently moved here; the old company headquarters in the south of Passau had become too small. “We now have around 18 million pieces of cutlery in stock,” says Hannes Gruber. “We started our business in a 300 square meter hall, and now there are 4,000.” The native Austrian, 54 years old and grew up in Salzburg, is tanned and quite strongly built. You can tell that the trained waiter is used to being hands-on. He invented the company 14 years ago and built it up together with his wife Pamela, 48. At first she drove the big trucks because, unlike him, she has a truck driver’s license. The other truckers on the motorway were quite amazed, says Hannes Gruber.
Used to be hands-on: Pamela and Hannes Gruber started their cutlery cleaning company more than ten years ago.
(Photo: Julius Schien)
He actually came up with the idea for the cutlery at Oktoberfest in 2009. At that time he was the service boss in Sepp Krätz’s hippodrome house box. That stood where the Marstall festival tent can be found today. Gruber had already been working at the hippodrome for 15 years when he came up with this unique business idea. The duties of the waitresses and waiters included polishing cutlery and wrapping it in napkins every day. And then there was this one waiter who always came late and constantly complained: “I’m going to get someone now, I’ll give him 20 euros to wrap the cutlery for me!” Why not, Gruber thought to himself, I can do it for 20 euros.
The idea grew, and it quickly became clear that outsourcing this unloved activity would solve a number of other problems. For example, that the waiters couldn’t serve when they were cleaning cutlery. And that at peak times there was always too little cutlery because other service staff had stashed it for their tables: “The waitresses and waiters always hid the cutlery they had wrapped themselves somewhere. Of course, always more than you actually needed,” says Gruber, “Often more than twice as much was stashed away so that we were on the safe side.” He took his idea to Sepp Krätz, who agreed to a pilot test in his tent, and so Gruber’s cutlery wrapping task force was used for the first time.
“Sometimes there’s a bra included”
It worked really well and the Schottenhamel Festival Hall was there the next year. It quickly became clear: This could become a business. Hannes and Pamela Gruber borrowed money and founded their company in 2010. Since then, it has grown “by around 20 to 25 percent” every year, as the owner proudly notes. “We supply 26 festival tents at the Oktoberfest,” says Hannes Gruber, “including all the big ones except the Käfer-Schänke.” So about half of the smaller tents, and you can easily calculate that the other half is so small that a large order to Passau would not be profitable at all. That’s a million pieces of cutlery per day, just for the Oktoberfest. However, 540,000 are lost every year, fall on the ground, are stolen or disappear into garbage containers. However, with a total of 16 to 18 million parts delivered, that’s not that much.
Of course, Oktoberfest isn’t everything. The Cannstatter Wasen with its 3.5 million visitors, which begins on the second weekend of the Oktoberfest, is also supplied. Just like most of the large folk festivals in Bavaria from Karpfham to Straubing. Cologne and Düsseldorf are also there – Carnival! – and various large restaurateurs, from the Munich Hofbräuhaus to the Löwenbräukeller and various beer gardens, but also clinics and large canteens. You can all choose between six cutlery lines of different quality levels, and the paper napkins can be printed with your own logo.
At the end, nicely packaged and, if desired, with an inscription or your own logo: the cleaned dishes.
(Photo: Julius Schien)
But why is it that so many innkeepers are willing to give up not only spoons but also knives and forks in order to be delivered by the Grubers from Passau? “We can simply make it significantly cheaper, up to a third,” explains Gruber, “than if they wash, sort and change clothes themselves.” Water, electricity and dishwashing liquid alone would be significantly more expensive. And the restaurateurs have no extra costs for cutlery, and you can also save on personnel costs. The transport from Passau to the place of use is hardly significant – 34 pallets, each weighing 700 kilos, fit on one truck. That’s a good 360,000 pieces of cutlery per truck and enough for eight tents. On the way back everything is a little more difficult because the cutlery is used and dirty. In the tents it is simply tipped into red bins, which gastro guests pick up between midnight and six in the morning.
In the Passau industrial hall, the dirty cutlery is roughly sorted on a conveyor belt. It rattles and clatters loudly when the red bins are emptied. Sorting things out by hand is a dirty job; between the pieces of cutlery there are often large leftovers of food, napkins, mustard packets, broken beer mugs, “and sometimes there’s even a bra.” Separated into knives, forks and spoons, the cutlery goes into the two large washing machines, which look like vats. A specially developed detergent made from porcelain granules washes the cutlery together with water in four minutes and 20 seconds, and drying takes three minutes. A machine like this uses 63 kilowatts of electricity and 300 liters of water per hour for around 20,000 pieces of cutlery. A fraction of what it would take for the same amount in a tavern.
The cutlery items are cleaned and dried in less than eight minutes.
(Photo: Julius Schien)
Then it’s time to put it together, wrap it and pack it.
(Photo: Julius Schien)
The finished cutlery goes into blue bins with a loud clatter. They in turn come to the next hall, where assistants wrap them in napkins and pack them in special films made from recycled PET bottles. Up to five items – such as cutlery, lemon cloth and toothpicks – fit in one pack. “My top winders can process up to 700 pieces of cutlery per hour,” says Gruber, “that’s much faster than any machine.” Exactly how this works is a trade secret; the Grubers don’t let anyone see their cards. At least they say this much: “At peak times we employ around 70 people.”
All of this actually sounds like a manageable business, you only have to handle a knife, fork, spoon, napkins and a few small parts. But then again it isn’t. Because it is a huge logistical challenge that is easily underestimated. “At the last Oktoberfest, a new company wanted to compete with us and had actually won a medium-sized tent as a customer,” says Hannes Gruber, “but on the Tuesday after the first weekend we got a call from the tent operator asking us to provide the cutlery service take over because the competition failed.”
And you need a certain amount of experience. Gruber says that he can now often tell a new customer how much cutlery they need more precisely than the host and the waitresses themselves. However, that is not the only skill he has acquired over the years: “I can For example, you can tell who the customer is by the smell of some returns containers.” If that isn’t a topic for the television classic “Wetten, dass…?” is: Match 25 Oktoberfest tents by smell – great, the bet is valid!