Pivot table or Chart, but data has multiple items in a single cell

Looking for opinions on best solution

Scenario:
My data has several columns, such as name, place, items (these are just examples...)
I have to do several pivot tables. One pivot table will be Name by Count of items provided, 2nd would be Place by Count of items provided, and third will be a list of Items and how many times they have appeared in the data. No doubt, I'll also need to somehow provide some table or graph listing the names or places, by the actual items (so, jim requested item #5 six times, item #2 twenty times.. etc

I don't have the data yet. I will soon be provided this data via emails, and I need to add it to a spreadsheet. The people will email me with a list of items required.. some might have 1 item, other emails could have 20 items - or anything in between. For this reason, it is a challenge to have separate columns or rows for each item.
I was going to capture it by the 3 columns provided above, and just have all the items in a single cell, separated by a comma.

The list of items is a known list, but there are like 5,000 different options. I know I could put a known static list and then do countifs or sumifs or something, to count how many times they appear, but they are always adding new items - i could never keep up, and probably 90% of the items I would never see. I could just keep adding servers to a list as they are requested, but say in 8 months, it will become a pain trying to determine if that item requested is already on the list or not (they aren't simple words, but actually server names with complicated letters and numbers)

example data

Name Place Item
Rob Canada apple, banana, orange
Rob Canada apple
Jim USA pineapple, banana

etc.. this is obviously just sample, as I don't have the data yet.

I guess my questions are 1) is this the best way to capture this information ? is there a better way that will make analyzing the data easier without a huge hassle of adding the data to spreadsheets?, and, 2) can a pivot table be created out of this mess?

Looking for the opinions of those much more familiar with excel than I!
thanks!
Rob

The only challenge with that, is if someone requests 20 items, i'm going to have to add 20 rows of data for that one request.. when someone asks me how many requests did that person make, its going to look like 20, when they only sent 1... they want me to track how many times each person sends a request too.

Updated my profile forgot about that

hmm.. I've never tried a get and transform data before.. the format of that structure looks similar to how power bi works..
I'll give this a try in excel, thank you for your assistance!