As Auckland Zoo's stores coordinator, Ian Pownall is responsible for rustling up food boxes for more than 1400 animals, each with a very specific diet.
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"I can tell you say one of the smallest diets which would be the agouti, which has three items in it. I would then make up one for say a baboon that could have anything from 20-30 items."
The food prep area has a walk in freezer, kept at -14 Celsius degrees, a walk-in fridge full of restaurant-quality fruit and vegetables and a dry store.
It has rows of shelves like a basic supermarket, containing everything from dry pellets and tinned soup to fruit cordial used for bin-sized animal ice blocks in summer and quite a few, more unusual items like pregnancy tests.
"Pregnancy tests are not for the staff," Mr Pownall says. "The difference in DNA between humans and some of the primates is only about two percent so we can actually use these to see if any of the primates are pregnant."
It's not the only unusual item in the dry stores, there are bottles of cordial which Mr Pownall says the keepers use in summer to make ice blocks in huge wheelies bins and once or twice a week they get insect deliveries.
"Just from memory you're looking at 4000-5000 meal worms," Mr Pownall explains. "We have meal worms, locusts, crickets, house flies a variety of things."
The Zoo can't breed enough insects currently to keep up with demand, though they hope to in the future, and a local supplier breeds insects of all sizes for the zoo's residents.
Every day Mr Pownall preps each crate for each animal with a mix of everything they'll need, the walk in fridge is like a mini greengrocers for the zoo.
In the centre of the fridge there's a tower of crates, each with a yellow Post-It note, labeling which of the residents would be getting their paws (or hooves) on the meal inside.
In a big, grey crate is the elephant diet for two days, "there's one marked for birds, giraffe, nayala, rhino baboon, lemur, tamarin, squirrel monkeys, saimans, flying fox, agouti, so all of that is for one particular section which is for the rainforest and it's all for today".
After the crates are checked they have to be delivered.
Once they're stacked onto his truck, dry goods are added and anything the keepers may have asked for, batteries, suncream, before Ian drives through the zoo to make deliveries.
As the sun came up, giraffes made their way out of their house, stretching their legs and a few curious ostriches eyed us through the fence.
The crates will stay at their sections until feeding time when the keepers arrive, but Mr Pownall isn't done yet.
Back at the stores, he begins to prep all the food boxes for the next day and it's no easy task. Each animal needs a specific diet which changes throughout the week and the year.
"In the squirrel monkey diet for today there are pears oranges, rock melon, beetroot swede, parsley spinach, green beans frozen peas, nine boiled eggs and some monkey cubes.
"I've got three eggs to add to that which I'm just going to put in that I boiled last night. I boil 72 hard-boiled eggs a day.
"The agouti gets a different diet seven days a week, so does the capybara and spider monkey. However, if we look at the giraffe, daily gets the same four items seven days a week and the rest of its diet is made up with browse (tree and shrub branches), pellets and other items."
A capybara is a South American rodent - the biggest in the world. They look like good-natured, dog sized guinea pigs. At Auckland Zoo, they live with the squirrel monkeys.
Mr Pownall's day won't finish till 2pm but we got to watch as the carefully prepared food boxes were unpacked and the capybaras tuck into a breakfast of silverbeet.
