Behind the Scenes of How Airline Meals Are Made
People have been cracking jokes about airline meals for decades. Comedians riff on “mystery meat” that could be anything from beef to shoe leather, dinner rolls hard enough to chip a tooth, or pasta so overcooked it comes as one piece. Even the classic “beef or chicken?” line has been used as a punchline in countless stand-up routines and sitcoms.
Interestingly, behind these meals, there’s a massive, complex operation happening on the ground. The reality of getting a meal to your tray table is more impressive than you might think. This is a world of military precision, industrial-scale production, and chefs who have to get wildly creative.
A Factory of Flavor
Image via Unsplash/Gervyn Louis
The numbers alone are mind-boggling. At a large-scale catering facility, hundreds of employees work around the clock to produce as many as 200,000 meals a week. These enormous kitchens are often located just a stone’s throw from the runway, so that they can serve dozens of airlines and hundreds of flights every day.
The process is a mix of large-scale production and meticulous, hands-on work. Every ingredient is carefully sourced and tracked. At one facility, for example, the kitchen is the largest buyer of potatoes, onions, and butter in its entire country. Fresh produce arrives daily and is prepped by hand.
The airline food business is evolving fast. With a huge increase in demand expected over the next decade, some facilities are turning to robots and other forms of automation to keep up. These new facilities are designed to minimize delays and make sure thousands of flights get catered on time.
The Chef’s True Challenge
At 35,000 feet, the dry air and cabin pressure affect our sense of smell and taste. It is a scientific fact that a significant portion of our taste buds are dulled at altitude. This is why a simple dish might taste bland on a plane but fine on the ground, and why bright, acidic, and umami flavors often taste so good in the air.
To combat this, airline chefs have to get creative. They develop recipes that are intentionally over-seasoned to taste “just right” in the air. For some flights, this even means turning a dish on its head.
For example, to prevent a simple chicken teriyaki from becoming tough and leathery after being reheated in a tiny convection oven, chefs sometimes transform the dish into a ground chicken and mushroom meatloaf. It survives the reheating process and still tastes delicious.
The demands on these chefs go far beyond just flavor. They have to work within strict rules, including food safety concerns that eliminate raw proteins and the limitations of flight attendants who are not trained as cooks.
Celebrity chefs often create premium-class menus that have to be plated perfectly, according to a photo guide. There are also last-minute requests for special dishes, such as wagyu beef, which the kitchen must accommodate.
From Prep Kitchen to Your Tray Table
Image via Unsplash/Oskar Kadaksoo
The journey of an in-flight meal is a masterclass in logistics. After the food is cooked and plated, it is blast-chilled to a safe temperature before being loaded onto the carts you see rolling down the aisle. Aside from food, these facilities also manage every other item you encounter on a flight, including pillows, blankets, amenity kits, and first-class pajamas.
One catering facility even handles all of its laundry, with machines that clean and fold hundreds of thousands of pounds of blankets every single day. When a plane lands, the process goes into reverse.
The used carts are unloaded and brought back to the facility, where a team sorts through every item by hand. They recycle what they can, discard leftover food, and wash and sanitize every dish, spoon, and cup. Everything is prepared for its next journey into the sky.
When a flight attendant asks, “beef or chicken?” now you’ll know it has been on a journey of its own, prepared by a team of people who have gone to great lengths to keep the process going.