Réunion & MAYOTTE

DECEMBER 2024 - MARCH 2025

In December I learned of two French territories off Madagascar—Réunion to the east, Mayotte to the west. A cyclone had devastated Mayotte, leaving the community in ruins. The French military sealed the island, closing the airport after air traffic control was destroyed, and took command of the crisis. With no civilian access, we set up remotely on Réunion, working out of a hotel conference room.

We purchased 150,000 MREs from South Africa and air-freighted them to Réunion, forming the spine of our supply chain. From there, we leaned on the military to shuttle urgent product into Mayotte by aircraft—at that time the only planes permitted to land—while also building a sea freight pipeline. Containers of food and supplies would take two weeks at best, but they could carry far more.

At the same time, we began sourcing everything needed to build a kitchen from scratch: burners, pots, cutting boards, knives, tables, refrigeration, generators. Orders came from Spain, France, and Turkey, some of it manufactured to spec because quantities simply didn’t exist in stock. On Mayotte, we took over a storm-damaged sports facility, turning the gymnasium into a warehouse and a neighboring community hall into the kitchen.

The MREs reached Réunion within two weeks, bridging the gap until cooking could begin. As head of supply chain, my priority was to keep the global network moving before relocating myself. It was more prudent to coordinate from Réunion, where infrastructure and communications worked, than from the chaos of Mayotte. That meant myself and a few of my team spent Christmas on Réunion. We marked the day with an eight-mile hike up the island’s volcano—4,000 calories burned—before settling for an Asian-fusion buffet as our holiday dinner. Soon after, we move into Mayotte.

There, we scaled operations. We chartered a ship from Nairobi that carried 20 containers of rice, flour, and water—products the island simply lacked. Protein we managed to source locally, but vegetables were scarce, so we flew in onions and canned goods by the ton. We also procured forklifts, tools, refrigerated containers, and other heavy assets on Réunion and shipped them across. It was incredibly rewarding to see the stoves and pots we ordered in Istanbul arrive to the kitchen in Mayotte, these feats feel like miracles. I always feel that sense when I'm able to land a refrigerated container and get it power as well. Our hotel on Mayotte was a modest 'resort' called The Jade, where we would cook dinner for ourselves using the outdoor kitchen.

This deployment gave me another chance to refine the dish pit. I built a larger, sturdier version with a gravity-fed grease trap that solved the clogging issues we’d faced in Florida, and I experimented with filtering water for reuse—ambitious given our limited materials, but a worthwhile evolution of the system.

It took nearly a month to stand up the kitchen, far longer than the 48 hours it had taken me in Florida. But given the circumstances—an isolated island, shattered infrastructure, global sourcing of equipment that in many cases didn’t even exist when we arrived—I consider it an achievement.