Inside the Zoo Atlanta kitchen: A look at how staff feeds over 1,300 animals

On an early morning in June, wearing purple latex gloves, Chandlar Carlile stood with a sharpened knife slicing through papaya, honeydew, lettuce and an assortment of other produce inside a shiny commercial kitchen. She turned the pages of a binder full of recipes and selected chunks to weigh on a scale before methodically lining up containers along her stainless steel table.

Across the kitchen, Chandler Karki was at another station, rationing and bagging ground meat into plastic bags. Kitchen manager Rytis Daujotas darted around, lining up empty, color-coded buckets waiting to be filled with ingredients. A dishwasher droned in the background.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

From all appearances, the kitchen could be that of any restaurant prepping for a lunch rush. It is not.

It’s the animal nutrition kitchen tucked in the back corner of Zoo Atlanta where a team of managers, nutrition technicians, bamboo hunters and other staff work together to prepare meals and snacks for more than 1,300 animals living at Zoo Atlanta.

Those animals represent more than 220 different species from around the globe, each with their own unique nutritional needs. Mimicking their natural diets in an Atlanta kitchen takes creativity. Equally important is ensuring the proper nutritional balance has been achieved through animal observation and monitoring.

Inside the kitchen that feeds nearly 1,000 animals a day at Zoo Atlanta. Credits: AJC | Zoo Atlanta / YouTube

Nutrition sleuths

A few years ago, zookeepers noticed something odd about a young golden-breasted starling. The bird’s legs were developing an abnormal shape.

Dr. Sam Rivera, vice president of animal health at Zoo Atlanta, took the bird for X-rays and determined it was suffering from weakened bones. He instructed the zoo’s nutrition kitchen to add vitamin D and calcium supplements to the bird’s daily diet. Within a few weeks, the bird’s legs began to adjust properly.

On another occasion, zookeepers noticed a whole herd of goats rapidly losing weight.

“One challenge with nutritional deficiencies or nutrient imbalances is that it can affect entire populations if the same diet is fed to a group, like a flock of birds or a gorilla family group,” said Rivera.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

In the case of the goats, their diet consisted primarily of hay. Rivera took a sample of the zoo’s most recent hay delivery and sent it to an outside lab for nutritional testing.

Hay’s composition ratios of fiber, protein and trace minerals can fluctuate throughout the year or from different growing conditions. The test revealed that the hay was not up to Zoo Atlanta’s standards. Once the hay was replaced with a higher quality batch, the goats bellies returned to their proper roundness.

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This type of nutritional sleuthing is part of a zookeeper’s job.

“Keepers are the first line of defense when it comes to spotting something off with an animal,” said Rivera. “They watch animals daily for changes in appetite, behavior, weight, stool quality or energy levels … Over time, they notice subtle changes that might indicate a chronic nutritional deficiency or excess.”

If a nutritional deficiency goes undetected, Rivera said the consequences can be dire.

“This can lead to a delay in proper treatment. In severe cases, it can lead to irreversible damage or even death,” Rivera said.

When a problem is detected, Rivera works with the zoo’s nutritional kitchen to adjust the animal’s diet by changing recipes, altering ingredients, adding supplements or changing brands.

Zoo Atlanta’s nutrition kitchen is thus a vital spoke in turning out the nutritious, balanced food essential for animal health, breeding, conservation and public enjoyment.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Behind the scenes

On each counter in the nutrition kitchen, calendars and recipes Rivera helped formulate are found inside binders to guide the nutrition technicians in their daily food prep. On Sundays, the giraffes get a case of romaine in their morning delivery, while on Tuesdays, the reptile house gets a box of oyster mushrooms and reptile salad consisting of carrots, yellow squash, zucchini and other veggies.

Not much cooking happens in the kitchen. An occasional sweet potato is boiled to make it softer for geriatric animals. Or some hard animal biscuits may be ground down and baked into a soft cake. But most of the food is served raw or frozen.

The walk-in freezer is the dead giveaway that the kitchen is no ordinary kitchen. Racks of frozen rodents are inside, labeled with cheeky names: “colossal rats,” “rat pups,” “fuzzies” (grown mice), “hoppers” (small mice) and “pinkies” (tiny mice). Whole fish are in the back.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Tubes of ground meat called “Nebraska Feline,” sourced from a specialty company, is a combination of chicks, rats and quail bones meant for feline predators. Knuckle bones from cows are kept for treats.

On the opposite side of the kitchen is a dry food storage room. Shelves of what look like giant bags of dog food are really kibbles and bits manufactured for different types of animals. What’s more interesting in this storage room, though, are the shelves of human groceries and supplements one might not expect for animals. Prenatal vitamins are stocked for pregnant gorillas. Centrum multivitamin gummies are there, too.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

An entire wall is devoted to shelving products that can help trick animals into taking medication. Just as one might hide a pill in peanut butter for their dog, Rivera uses peanut butter for the orangutans. Prunes, honey, dried figs, molasses, golden raisins and even baby food are found in this section.

Outside behind the kitchen, near the loading docks, Daujotas frequents one more room: the refrigerated storage room for bamboo. Before moving into the kitchen a few years ago, Daujotas was employed as a bamboo hunter.

Bamboo hunters are staffed by Zoo Atlanta specifically to harvest bamboo stalks within a 50-mile radius of the zoo. The public can donate bamboo from their property by filling out an online form at zooatlanta.org. When the bamboo hunters get a lead, they investigate, determining if the bamboo is an appropriate varietal and unsullied by pollutants or proximity to major thoroughfares. If the bamboo is suitable, the hunters harvest it.

Back when Zoo Atlanta housed four giant pandas from China, the bamboo hunters were even more critical to supplying the zoo’s needs. Though there is now a reduced need, many animals still feed on bamboo. The elephants, for example, receive five bundles of bamboo multiple times a week.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Today is one of those days. Daujotas opens up the bamboo refrigerator, takes out an armload of stalks and loads them on to a golf cart dubbed the “Nutrition Wagon” in the loading bay. He also packs the back with 5-gallon paint buckets filled with a rainbow of produce, all going to the elephants. Rivera joins aboard.

The wagon pulls up to the back of the elephant building, where a distinct odor hangs in the air.

“Of course, one of the things about nutrition: Food that goes in has to come out, and there it is. … Right here is where we put the elephant waste,” said Rivera, pointing to a cargo truck-sized dumpster full of elephant dung. “It gets composted. There is a company that comes and picks up the rhino and elephant waste.”

Zoo Atlanta currently has four African elephants. This day, the elephant keepers are focused on one, Kelly, a 7,400-pound female who was born in Namibia in 1983 and was brought to Zoo Atlanta in 1986. Kelly is getting a bath. At least some of the fruits and veggies brought over by the wagon will help convince Kelly to get soapy.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

“She tends to like the sweet stuff,” said Kirby Miller, one of the elephant keepers. “So apples, melons, oranges. They’d rather eat that than the celery a lot of the times. Or they like whole produce. We give them a whole orange or whole melon; they really like that. Pumpkins and watermelons are their favorites.”

Miller tosses an entire orange into Kelly’s mouth. She devours it in one bite.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

When her bath is over, it’s time for Kelly to join her herd in the outdoor Savannah viewing area, where the zoo nutrition team has prepared some bundles of browse. Browse is a combination of leaves, branches, twigs and bark — the type of vegetation an animal might eat as they browse a forest.

“(Browse) is harder for us to provide in a nutrition kitchen,” said Rivera. “So we have a team.”

Like the bamboo hunters, the browse team goes out early in the morning, driving around Atlanta to collect leaves and limbs. Zoo Atlanta has a partnership with Georgia Power so that when trees are cut down to clear power lines, Zoo Atlanta can collect the browse for animals.

Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com

Kelly knew just where to find the browse, suspended in bundles like piñatas from towers above. She reached her trunk to the sky to shake the bundle and munch.

At the end of the day, when the browse is eaten and the paint buckets are empty of produce, the nutrition kitchen resets. In the morning, the bamboo hunters and browse collectors will set out across Atlanta to gather greens. The nutrition technicians will resume their stainless-steel posts in the kitchen. The wagon will be loaded to deliver the day’s meals. The animals will be well fed. And a zoo will carry out its mission to protect and conserve wildlife.