Inside Airline Catering: From Farm To Plane (2024)

Airline catering is a massive industry, providing over a billion meals to passengers every year. At this scale, airlines and caterers have the task of sourcing, preparing, and delivering hundreds of meals for every flight. Here's the story of airline catering, from the farm to your tray table!

Who decides the meal?

The decision of what you are served onboard lies with the airlines themselves. The process is a bit more complicated than planning a meal at home because the sensitivity of your taste buds is reduced by around 30% due to the dryness of the air onboard.

For airlines serving more than just peanuts and a croissant, what you eat can be decided up to nine months before the flight. The tricky nature of plane food makes it an essential part of the flight experience. The rise of ultra-long-haul flights has also pushed airlines to innovate with food further to keep passengers awake at the right times.

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Occasionally, airlines tie-up with celebrity chefs to create special menus for their premium customers. These tend to focus on food that tastes good while flying. Deciding what dishes to serve is a serious one for airlines, especially in business or first class cabins, and most have teams of chefs for this process. But what is the process of creating thousands of meals every day? Let's find out.

Farming and sourcing

It's important to note that most airlines don't cater meals for their own flights outside their hub airports. Instead, they rely on professional airline catering companies. This explains why the quality of meals might be different when taking connecting flights since caterers change, too.

The first step in creating an inflight meal is farming and sourcing the various components that go into a dish. The main target is to prepare fresh food that tastes good at 35,000 feet, which isn't easy. Since catering companies usually require large quantities of everything they produce, contracts are signed well in advance for all the ingredients.

Photo: Tatenda Karuwa | Simple Flying

Catering companies will begin sourcing the various components depending on the meals served onboard. Most items can be bought in advance and stored in bulk, but fresh items such as vegetables, meats, and fruits must constantly be replenished. This means catering companies usually have complex supply chains to keep everything moving.

At major airports like London Heathrow, several processes are required to get ingredients where they are supposed to be on time. Catering companies like LSG Sky Chefs can make over 40,000 meals daily at a single airport. Delivery of supplies starts as early as 05:00, with over 50 deliveries coming from 80 different suppliers.

Production

With all the ingredients in place, caterers begin making dishes on an industrial scale. Elements must be measured and cut precisely to fit the palette, which measures 15 x 10 x 3.2 cm on average. Some chefs even measure vegetables with a ruler. The weight of the food is also crucial, as an additional 50g per palette can increase the aircraft's weight and result in greater fuel consumption.

Before food gets onboard, it has to be blast chilled to below 46.4 °F (8 °C). This is a critical hygienic measure, as hot food runs the risk of bacterial growth. Anything going wrong on this step can result in all the food being thrown away, like the recent yet infamous British Airways flight, where passengers were served single pieces of KFC.

Airline catering kitchens are generally near airports for quick transportation and turnaround time. These kitchens are one of the many buildings near airport terminals and vary in size depending on the number of flights they serve. Nearly every major airport features multiple catering facilities for departing airlines.

Kenya Airways recently took us behind the scenes to see what our meals go through before reaching the tray table at cruising altitude. Approximately a tonne of vegetables is consumed on KQ flights daily, making over 12,000 meals, with about 1,200 people involved. This makes the national carrier the biggest restaurant in Kenya.

Ensuring quality

While everyone has their opinion about airline food, one fact remains: food at 35,000 ft tastes different from what it would on the ground. However, the quality of your meal also depends on the airline and class you may be flying. Some carriers invest a lot of money to ensure that all their passengers receive top-quality food, especially on long-haul flights. With your ability to taste sweet and salty foods significantly reduced, chefs tend to add more spices to meals. This can backfire, too, with passengers sometimes complaining of over-salted food.

Photo: dnata

Chefs commonly use umami-rich ingredients like tomatoes, anchovies, seaweeds, and Parmesan, which taste well in flight. After preparation, the food is taste-tested before being packed and stored. One trick is to pinch your nose to get a sense of what the food might taste like at over 30,000 ft.

Delivery

The final step in the process is getting the food to the aircraft. This requires a degree of efficiency since the food must be temperature-controlled, and aircraft generally have speedy turnaround times, meaning crews must move quickly.

Catering companies have a fleet of cold trucks that transport food from the nearby kitchens to the aircraft. These trucks then rise to the plane's height on the apron to deliver the food. These can usually be spotted during boarding, with crews moving large trolleys with food.

Photo: Sorbis / Shutterstock

This is also a critical stage of the operation, as the crew has to follow strict safety protocols. Earlier this year, a Viva Aerobus Airbus A320 fuselage was damaged after being hit by a catering truck while parked on the apron. Luckily, this was after a flight, but an incident like this before takeoff could result in several delays and losses.

Once on the plane, the cabin crew begins heating food soon after take off. This usually involves placing the dishes in a convection oven that rapidly warms the food, placing them on a tray, and serving them from a trolley. Passengers in business class and first class may also have some of their meals freshly prepared on a stove and plated onto cutlery after heating.

Small changes

Premier airlines have provided passengers with a fine dining experience from as far back as the 'golden age' of air travel. Although things have significantly changed since then, especially for economy passengers, some airlines still put much effort into meal preparation.

Menus are now tailored to cater to different passengers, depending on where the carrier takes off. When flying on a roundtrip, you may have noticed that the menu on the first leg will be different from the one on the return leg, probably with more indigenous ingredients. These are some of the minor changes introduced over the years.

Photo: Iberia

While airline catering may only seem like a small part of the travel experience, it's a massive industry. However, just like any part of aviation, it took a brutal hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. This period saw a lot of catering companies close shop while some opened up small restaurants serving airplane food. While the inflight offering was reduced, it made way for improved health and safety practices.

However, industrial-scale food production is back, with global traffic nearing pre-pandemic levels. The airline catering market was valued at $9.6 billion last year and is expected to grow to over $20 billion by 2028.

What do you think about inflight meals? Do you love them or hate them? Tell us your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!