South Lakes Wild Animal Park Goes Shopping

Plucking up the incentive to do the families monthly shop is bad enough for a normal household; wading round the supermarket with a laden trolley with enough supplies to please everyone and last a family of 4 is challenge enough!  Imagine instead of the normal household mouths to feed, you had more than 220,000 - 18,000 visitors a month to shop for – imagine the number of trolleys you’d need.

It’s bad enough at home when you run out of loo roll or washing up liquid, when you go through up to 15 industrial size toilet rolls and a gallon of dishwasher powder a day popping to the shops isn’t really an option.

On a busy day in the cafe we can go through 48 bags of chips; 150 baguettes; 100 burgers (and buns and cheeses slices) 120 teabags; 240 bottles of coca cola; 120 Fab ice lollies.  The seasonality and weather affects our needs which is why it is essential to have very good relationships with all our suppliers; we know that we can order something and it is with us the next day.

Then there are your pets, dog food, cat food, bunny food and all the necessary supplies – going home without “Markies in our household is a big no no! Imagine having 80 different types of “pets”, to cater for the needs of more than 360 individuals, we need to make sure all the animals get the nutrients they need on a daily basis. .   

Our Penguins, Giant Otters & birds eat their way through 40 kilos of fish a day – that’s 14,600 kilos a year. Our Giant Otters are fussy eaters and will only eat fresh water roach so our Fish order has to be specific for them.

Our carnivores – Jaguars, Lions, Tigers, Fennec Foxes munch their way through 200 Kilos of meat a week that’s 10,400 kilos a year plus 45 chickens a week – 2,340 a year!

Its rats we have to buy our snakes, about 6 a month.

Our ever growing heard of Rhinos and Giraffes munch their way through ¾ of a bale of hay a day that’s 273 huge bales of hay a year. 

Our Primates, with the help of local supermarkets – Asda, Morrisons, Tesco, very healthily eat their way through 25,000 tons of fresh fruit & vegetables every year.

Our animals go through more than 95,000 kilos of dry food every year; most of which comes from Broughton Supplies, buying in bulk pallets at a time.  Our herd of giraffes alone eat around a 1/3 of this. 

Our last hay delivery was for 55 bales and it took one trained forklift driver 1 ½ hours to offload.

From 15 jumbo toilet rolls per day to the thousands of tons of animal food, we have hundreds of suppliers, many of them local, spending over a million pounds annually to maintain the park.  

	Average Kilos fresh food		Kilos dry food
Tamarins	2.1	Per Day	261.9
Siamangs	2.1	Per Year	95,594
Lar Gibbons	2
Spider Monkeys	4.2
Howler Monkeys	0.8
Mandrills	12
Ruffed Lemurs	12
Ring Tailed Lemurs	12
Gentle Lemurs	1
Black Lemurs	1.2
Brown Lemurs	2.1
Mongoose Lemurs	1.5
Baboons	18
Capuchins	4.6
Bats	5.2
Per Day	80.8
Per Year	29,492