From warehouse to the sands of South Beach: Festival prep in full swing

When you attend the South Beach Wine & Food Festival®, you’ll notice the fun vibes, enjoy the bites, and indulge in the cocktails. But long before guests arrive on the sand, what most people don’t see is the hundreds of hours of work FIU students perform at warehouses across South Florida to help get the Festival ready for the four-day mega event starting this Thursday. You could call it FIU’s very own super bowl of sorts.

A week before the 25th anniversary celebration of SOBEWFF®, FIU students gather for “warehouse day,” taking on the crucial yet unseen work that makes one of the largest wine and food festivals in the nation possible. They track inventory, coordinate shipments, and work in teams to prepare everything before it hits the beach. Every item accounted for at the warehouse is a small part of a much larger picture, but one that could make or break an event.

While all the wine, spirits and mixers as well as food will come from elswhere, the soft drinks, paper goods and “extras,” such as aprons and t-shirts that make up student uniforms for the event, are boxed up by the students and loaded onto 30+ pallets for more than 100 SOBEWFF® events. This critical preparation is based on operational and logistical concepts students have studied in classes.

“Hands-on doing it, understanding what prep it takes for an event and how much of those counts are really important,” said Rashel Villalonga, a sophomore at the Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management and student coordinator at SOBEWFF®. “A professor can just say it to you, but to do it and to make sure everything is accounted for so you don’t lack anything onsite, is completely different.”

Inventory control gives students a back-of-house perspective on what it takes to prepare an event hosting over 60,000 attendees, but it’s just one of the many roles they take on. Over the course of the four-day mega-event, more than 1,500 students participate in 4,300 shifts, leading events and logistics teams, prepping food, assisting guest registration, and overall preparation and execution.

“I’m very excited, it’s a great experience, something you can add to your resume as well as gaining logistical experience and leading groups,” said Peter Bauza, Hospitality Management major and event logistic leader at this year's Festival.

This experiential learning opportunity is what helps prepare students for their future careers and what keeps them coming back year after year.

Harshi Hegde, an organizational communications and entrepreneurship major who is serving as a senior recruitment coordinator and event manager at SOBEWFF®, is eager to return to the festival.

“I’m so excited to be onsite again, to be in full spirits, but at the same time I’m a little nervous to make sure everything goes right,” said Hegde.

The front-facing leaders get the photo-ops and on-site recognition, but it’s these students who lay the behind-the-scenes groundwork for the big show.

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