Pie in the Sky

Airline food does not enjoy the best of reputations, but with a new breed of on-board cooking and menu selection systems now emerging, its future could be a journey back to basics – with boiled egg and soldiers. Dan Jellinek reports

Airline food has long had a poor reputation — odd-tasting, odd-sized and arriving at odd times. In recent years, however, innovations in preparation and ingredients have seen huge improvements, not only towards the front of planes, but in the cheap seats where most of us travel as well.

To understand the challenges faced by airlines in serving any halfway decent food at all to passengers, you have to grasp the logistics.

British Airways serves around 100,000 meals a day on its flights worldwide, all of which have to be at least partially pre-prepared and pre-packed, then loaded onto flights in the right combinations.

Up to 16,000 meals a day — all the catering for the airline’s outbound long-haul flights — are created at a single unit on the outskirts of Heathrow airport: a vast dedicated kitchen and warehouse facility manned by 980 staff and operated by Gate Gourmet, the UK’s largest independent airline caterer.

The food is created in several stages, the first of which involves the arrival into one bay of all the ingredients; as fresh as possible but much of it of necessity at some stage of pre-preparation, such as pre-chopped ginger or liquid eggs for scrambling.

Some is then cooked or part-cooked in industrial quantities: cages of vegetables, for example, are lowered into vats of boiling water on hoists, then into another of cold water to fix the blanch. Given the scale of the operation, it is impressive how much of each meal is freshly cooked.