The making of an in-flight meal

An airline meal can range from basic to excellent – depending on what kind of ticket you have

Wed Sept 01 2010 - 01:00

An airline meal can range from basic to excellent – depending on what kind of ticket you have. Marie-Claire Digbyvisited the Gate Gourmet catering kitchens at Dublin Airport to find out what's on the menu

THE FIRST thing that strikes me about the in-flight food being prepared at Gate Gourmet’s catering kitchens at Dublin Airport is that it looks very appetising indeed, even at 7am, and it isn’t being assembled on doll-sized plastic plates. The “gourmet salad”, due to be served on a transatlantic flight later that day, consists of chunky slices of medium-rare Irish beef fillet, crispy greens, asparagus spears and a generous wedge of creamy blue cheese. It’s a meal I’d be happy to pay for in a good restaurant.

Every day, Gate Gourmet sends out an average of 4,200 complete meals from its production kitchens, just minutes from the runways. In a facility at the airport’s South Apron, staff prepare food for airlines including American Airlines, Air France, Delta, Lufthansa, Continental and CityJet (but not Aer Lingus or Ryanair).

In the “cold” kitchen a multi-national team of women are busy at three separate prep tables, making more tasty looking salads for three different airlines, to very exacting standards. Everything is weighed, and there are photographs at every workstation of the required presentation of the dishes being assembled, complete with instructions on exactly where each component should be placed on the plate: “Tomato at eight o’clock” – it’s that precise.

Around the corner in the “hot” kitchen, the chefs, all male, also multi-national, are grilling artichoke hearts, pan-frying prawns, and preparing crew meals for Air Canada, including roast chicken with stuffing, and grilled beef fillet. It’s real food, very good quality food at that, being prepared by qualified chefs in what looks just like a restaurant kitchen.

So why don’t my in-flight dining experiences remotely resemble anything like this? Well, because I don’t fly business class, nor do I work onboard an aircraft.

In another part of Gate Gourmet’s Dublin headquarters, there’s a depressingly familiar sight; salads heavy with iceberg lettuce are being squeezed into small plastic containers, destined to sit alongside a foil-wrapped tray of something a lot less fancy than those prawns and artichokes.

These hot dishes will have arrived at Gate Gourmet as frozen readymeals, ready to go into an onboard oven, then dropped onto a plastic tray, garnished with a bread roll, and a chocolate mint, if you’re lucky.

WHAT YOU EAT ON BOARD an aircraft comes down to economics – specifically the price you’re willing to pay for your ticket. But your choice of airline can also determine the quality of food you eat on board. Some airlines spend more than others on their in-flight offering. That goes for business class and economy passengers, and the crew too. Crew meals are generally better than those offered to economy passengers, and pilot and co-pilot will always eat different meals.

Brian Murnane, general manager of Gate Gourmet Ireland, explains the reasons behind the varying standard of food served by airlines: “The nutritional content and the design of the food is really brand-specific to the airline. We have a wide range of what we can do not very nutritious, to a wonderfully aesthetic culinary excellence, but it’s a reflection of the airline’s brand; they decide.”

No matter how much or how little an airline spends on in-flight catering, it’s a recognised fact that some things taste better at altitude than others, so what constitutes a successful onboard meal?

Eric Kremers, Gate Gourmet’s production and purchasing manager, explains: “One of the key things you have to take into consideration is that when you are high up in the air, the taste buds are less active, so you have to season the food more highly for people to get the same sensations, so it doesn’t taste bland. Strong flavours and spices are good for this reason, and there is a tendency now to provide some meals that are good for blood flow, using chillies and certain spicy ingredients and with certain antioxidants, like turmeric.”

“It’s a logistics driven business. The really important thing that we bring is that we get the food where it needs to be at the right time. We operate within very tight time frames. When an aircraft comes in, it can have as little as 30 minutes turnaround time – there is no room for being even five minutes late,” Murnane says.

Sean McLoughlin, Gate Gourmet operations manager, is the person charged with making sure those thousands of meals get to the right aircraft on time. “We get the [passenger numbers] about 24 hrs in advance, and the final figures four hours before departure, but that can also change, and you always get last-minute requests.”

The airline business is notoriously cost-efficient, so how do they manage those fluctuating numbers, without anyone going hungry, and without incurring unnecessary wastage? Murnane explains: “There could be 200 people booked three days before departure. At the minus-24 hour figure, you’ll get an update which might say it’s 196, at minus-12 hours it might become 210, at minus-four, it might be back to 191, so we have to have systems in place that can take, process and respond to all those changes, right up to an hour before departure.”

A computer in the despatch area of the production kitchens, where the carts are loaded and final checks are made, including independent security screening of every cart destined for a transatlantic flight, displays the final order sheets, and not a single meal tray too few or too many goes out.

It is interesting to note that of the 36 carts lined up in the chill room awaiting despatch to a Delta flight to JFK, exactly half are destined for the business class cabin. It’s not that those in the good seats necessarily eat four times as much as those in the cheap seats – although they undoubtedly eat better – it’s that their meals are served with more pomp and ceremony, requiring additional equipment.

How is it decided how many portions of each meal option are loaded on a flight?

“The vast majority of airlines do that by ratio, it could be 60:40 or 50:50 or 40:40:20 depending on the number of choices,” Murnane explains. So, when the trolley arrives at your elbow and the “chicken or beef?” enquiry turns to “beef?” you should blame an imperfect mathematical calculation, rather than the cabin steward.

Ratio analysis is also used in deciding how much of each option to stock in first and business class – there is very little overstocking, even at this level – so even if you’re paying to turn left rather than right on entering the plane, you’re still not guaranteed to get the meal you want.

If you’re flying in a private plane, however, you can have it provisioned with anything you desire.

“We do some VIP work,” Murnane says. “The Arabs tend to order food as if their lives depend on it; they don’t want to turn around to the sultan or the sheikh and say they didn’t order something. They order everything in creation, and probably 90 per cent of it doesn’t get eaten. We recently put over €8,000 worth of food on a flight for four passengers, which sounds like an awful waste, but it had all kinds of wonderful things on it – lobster, caviar, Dublin Bay prawns . . . They wrote back and said what they enjoyed the most was the bread and butter pudding – which costs us 50 cent to make!”

It’s not just the VIP customers that have exacting standards. “Even on the scheduled carriers, the very fact that they have to design for global consistency makes our materials management very difficult. If you go down to our stores you’ll see several types of water, for example,” Murnane says.

“Etihad [a Gate Gourmet client] serves Al Ain water, which is imported from the United Arab Emirates. So here we are, importing water from the desert to Ireland, where we are full of water and good water at that, just for their flights, because they want their own brand. Logistically, and in cost terms, it makes no sense whatsoever, but it’s a requirement to reflect their brand image, because they’re going to have that water on all their flights, globally.”

When the in-flight trolley comes around, Gate Gourmet staff know better than most what to expect. So, if they had to choose one airline’s menu, which would it be?

“Etihad, without question. Theirs is the best business food in the sky,” Eric Kremers says. “Their economy food is as good as many business classes,” Sean McLoughlin adds.

An Etihad return ticket from Dublin to Abu Dhabi in November costs around €603 in economy; the same journey in business class will set you back €2,738 – just as well then that the food, which goes on board with a 10-page document for cabin crew detailing exactly how to reheat, present and serve it, is so very good.

Chicken or beef?

On an economy class tray

Starter

Salad (iceberg, romaine lettuce, carrot julienne, 2mm cucumber slices).

Main course

Choice of Cajun chicken or pasta pappardelle.

Extras and dessert

Ciabatta roll;

Edam cheese portion;

Choc chip vanilla cookie;

Jacobs table crackers;

Cream jiggers (for tea and coffee).