Munster Rugby has signed a three-year deal with leading café brand Zest! that will see the popular mid-west food retailer provide all meals for its senior and academy squads during training and travel.
The scale of feeding a Rugby set up like Munster means that it will come to around 15,000 meals a year.
There will be individualised meals for all squad sessions at the High-Performance Centre at UL as well as food packs for travel.
The agreement was officially signed off at Shannon Airport – home to one of Zest’s cafés, located airside, as well as its public restaurant, JJ Ruddles – last week.
It has grown out of an informal partnership running over the past 18 months where Zest provided one meal a week for players at UL.
That is now expanded to include breakfast, lunch and snack meals tailored to the specific requirements of each individual player for the squad sessions three times weekly and for their travel.
Zest! is headquartered in Shannon but has cafes across the region.
“This is an excellent partnership for us at Munster Rugby and a very significant commitment by Zest!” said Munster Rugby Head of Commercial and Marketing, Doug Howlett.
“We have built a really strong relationship over the past 18 months and have been very happy with all elements of their operations. The modern athlete has very specific dietary requirements which vary from player to player and meeting that involves, apart from anything else, a complex logistics operation.”
“Munster have been fantastic to work with from the off,” said Ean Malone, Co-Owner of Zest!
“They apply the same level of professionalism off the field as they do on it and aside from this being one of the greatest brands in Irish sport, this is the type of standard that we want to work with.”
“Becoming Munster Rugby’s food partner is a validation of the hard work and quality of our entire team. We have a big Munster fan base among our 230 staff, and they are really proud of the fact that they are now a cog in the Munster machine.”
