Jennifer Alpers, Director of Domestic Services

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m Jennifer Alpers. I’m the Director of Domestic Services here at Golden Era Productions. I’d like to show you my kitchen. Alright? So this is where the Sysco truck arrives and delivers all of our goods, here on the loading dock. And as you know, Sysco delivers to Disney and Disney is the parent company of ABC. Let’s carry on with the tour. Alright. So goods come in here, go into the three refrigerators on the loading dock and into our dry storage area here.

So this is the preps cook area, specifically, okay? This is where we do all of our protein preps. This is where the cheese gets cut, the salami, the beef, the roast beef, the chicken, the steaks, everything gets done right here. Over here, this is where our salad preps are done.

And right over here is where we make our granola. We make two types of granola for breakfast every single day. We make one with honey, one with stevia. And we offer a variety of different cereals for the staff every day including 7-grain, oatmeal, buckwheat, whatever. And we make about four or five different types of eggs.

So this is our deep fryer area and where we make, on our grill, all the eggs for the staff for breakfast every morning. This is where we make the French fries. This is where we make all the deep fried food for the staff, right here. This is our grill. This is where all the eggs are made. This is where we make, every morning we make poached, we make fried, we make scrambled eggs. We also make, we offer soft boiled eggs for the staff. This is for our breakfast; this is also where we grill steaks, where we grill our chicken. Various things like that.

And this is our hot cooking area. This is our main area where we’re preparing the meals for lunch and dinner. This are our two tilt skillets here for preparing our dishes, these are the two ovens, the convection ovens where we’re preparing the main lunch and dinner meal, and these are the two kettles where we prepare soup, every single day for lunch for our staff, from scratch, with raw, natural ingredients.

This is Specialty here. And in Specialty, what we do is, we prepare foods to cater to all the staff with special dietary needs, allergies, food sensitivities, any kind of regimen or diet that they might need. We also, in this area, prepare “grab and go bags” for the staff if they’re going to the doctor, if they are traveling, a lot of our staff go shooting—we prepare bags for them to go. And this is what gets done here in Specialty.

So what we have here is the bakery and we have a baker who is also our pastry chef here and he bakes fresh sourdough, fresh white bread and brown bread every single day for the staff. Alright, that’s in addition to other breads that he might make—special breads, raisin bread, all sorts of breads that he makes—cinnamon rolls, buns. He makes all the hamburger buns, all the hotdog buns are made homemade fresh here for the staff.

This is our pastry finishing area, alright. This is where the staff get their birthday cakes made. Everything gets done right here.

So in 2005, Mr. Miscavige directed the redesign and replanning of our kitchen. And he had the vision that it would be a model kitchen. And in order to serve this volume of people you really have to have a really well set-up kitchen and all the equipment, in order to be able to mass-produce food. And on this level, we feed four hundred and seventy-five people every single day, three times a day, and that’s throughout the year.

Wow! Anyone that would refer to our food as slop has actually never been here. It’s just like… you… just anyone that comes here, it’s like, they come here, they look at our salad bar, they go, “WOW.” It’s like you’ve got eight or nine or ten different vegetables. You’ve got spinach, you’ve got Romaine, you’ve got all these different types of lettuces. We’ve got vegetables, we’ve got four different salad dressings. I mean the variety alone blows people away. Let alone the nutritional value of the food. They actually, staff have told me and different people that have come here, that they actually need to eat less because they know that they’re getting more nutrition.

They’re getting food that’s not processed and prepackaged, because we’re preparing it all here in our kitchen because we have the facilities now to do it.

In terms of the standards of our food and what we’re… are expecting of ourselves and within the kitchen, it’s nothing but the more natural, raw ingredients, so that we’re feeding our staff clean products. We have an egg farm that… where we get our eggs. They’re organic, free-range eggs that we serve our staff every single morning. And we have coffee for the last years, many years, we’ve been serving that’s also organic, no pesticides, no herbicides. And the idea is that we are constantly working to get and convert all of our food groups so we have the best, most natural beef that we’re serving, and our hamburgers, our steaks or in our different meals that we’re serving, so that we provide our staff with the most nutritious meals possible.

All I can say is that I know Ron, and I’ve known him since the day he got here. And I have personally eaten with him and I’ve had him come into our kitchen and tell us how rave he is about the food, complimenting us, saying how great the meals are, how complimentary he is to our baker and our pastry chef, who’s made his, every single birthday cake for the last twenty-five years that he was here.

CHAPTERS:

#1 Jenny Alpers introduces herself and gives a tour of the kitchen. #2 Preps cook area. #3 Breakfast preps area. #4 Deep fryer area. #5 Hot cooking area. #6 Specialty area. #7 Bakery and pastry areas. #8 Quality and standards of the food served at Golden Era Productions. #9 How Ron Miscavige would rave about the food and compliment the chefs and baker.