Fueling up before a big workout is important for just about anyone, but when your job is “professional athlete,” it’s essential. And catering for athletes is as much of an art as it is a science. As a registered dietician, Adam Rodrigues, coordinator of Minor League Nutrition for the San Francisco Giants, relies on ezCater to ensure his players and staff are game-day ready.

“What we do from a nutrition standpoint is make sure that they’re optimally fueled,” Rodrigues says. “We want to make sure that they have as much food available for them to be able to have the energy to play, recover, and avoid injury. So essentially, we’re making sure that they have enough snacks and things to grab as well as a couple of meals on site.”

Rodrigues’s job entails using nutrition science to obtain optimal performance and recovery from the athletes he works with. In his case, that means ensuring that the Giant’s organization’s Arizona complex, as well as six affiliate minor league teams are optimally fed and fueled.

“On any given day we have eight meals going on, with six games per week,” Rodrigues says. “Before ezCater, I did a lot of researching and reaching out to local caterers using search engines.”

Ordering food six days per week for 160 players and staff quickly adds up to over 6,000 meals during a typical six-to-eight-month season. With teams traveling to new cities every day, it was time-consuming and stressful for Rodrigues to find dependable caterers and restaurants that could deliver quality meals while ensuring consistent and timely delivery and drop off.

“When you’re dealing with multiple locations that are requiring multiple meals per day, it can be a lot to manage. Especially when a lot of these locations are in smaller cities and towns where there’s not necessarily as plentiful options, you really have to dig around looking for stuff,” Rodrigues says. “Using ezCater, for us, has been a good way to help streamline some of those options and put it in one condensed location. This way, it’s almost like your own search engine to see what food is available.”

With over 100,000 restaurants to choose from, the ezCater marketplace has been a home run for the Giants. Rather than serving the same types of food over and over again, Rodrigues is easily able to provide new and exciting meals each day—something the athletes enjoy as well.

“Variety is tough to achieve, especially in some of the towns that don’t necessarily have all these options,” Rodrigues says. “I believe we’re able to provide really good quality catering for the athletes. Good quality, good variety, and I think overall they appreciate what we’re able to provide for them.”

When it comes to making sure meals arrive on time, ezCater’s robust tracking and reporting helps ensure that the players and staff never go hungry. But should they ever run into a problem—giant or small—ezCater is always there to lend a helping hand.

“You’re always going to have some sort of logistical issue with timing, portions, or cancellations,” Rodrigues says. “But I know from our experience having ezCater take the lead on some of that makes our lives a little bit smoother and a little bit quicker rather than being on the phone for any given time trying to fix things on the back end.”

Whether you’re catering for athletes – or for a hungry office with giant appetites, ezCater’s corporate solutions give you access to the variety your team needs, with the streamlined ordering and tracking your business requires – and unbeatable customer service. Learn more about ezCater Corporate Solutions and how we can help build a scalable and reliable food program for your organization.