What Really Happens to Your Airplane Meal Before It Reaches You

The meticulous work of serving a restaurant-style meal in the air is more involving than you think.

Some of my earliest memories are of airplane food.

Back then, I’d be on a Hawaiian Airlines L-1011 winging my way from Anchorage to Honolulu or an Alaska Airlines 727 from Anchorage to Sitka. And back then, whether it was the five-hour flight to Hawai‘i or the 90-minute flight to Juneau (then Sitka), a hot meal was always served.

On Hawaiian, I have distinct memories of stir-fry (whether chicken or beef, which always came with a generous helping of red pepper), chocolate cake, and little plastic packages of butter shaped like a flower. On Alaska Airlines, I’d be served an omelet breakfast with reindeer sausage, giant ice-cold muffins, or lasagna with those little semi-rigid paper tubes of salt and pepper, and the inevitable prayer card containing a verse from the Book of Psalms (Alaska faithfully distributed the prayer cards on their meal trays right up until 2013).

You could invariably smell the meals cooking before that magical announcement: “Ladies, and gentlemen, we’ll be coming through the cabin to serve a hot meal shortly…”

It was never lost on me that the technology to serve a tray of food to a diner in a pressurized metal tube, seven miles up, hundreds of miles from where the meal was originally assembled and cooked.

But how do they do that? We’ve all seen the carts and the plastic meal trays and the funny-looking scissor trucks that load the food and beverages in the airplane, but how about the rest? I talked with a couple of airlines, and even visited one of their catering facilities to learn a bit more.

Meal Planning

Alaska was once known for over-the-top onboard meals. In the late 1970s, they were a tiny regional airline just expanding south of Seattle for the first time, and in order to compete with larger airlines, they introduced a lavish dining concept they called Gold Coast Service. If you were a coach passenger flying from San Francisco to Anchorage via Seattle, you’d have a lovely prime rib dinner on the two-hour flight up to Seattle. You’d change planes, and then, if you wanted, you could have a second massive helping of prime rib on the flight up to Anchorage.

Alaska was so committed to better meals that, when it came time to order new aircraft, it opted for a seating configuration on its MD-80s that allowed for larger galleys to accommodate its elaborate dining.

The early 1990s recession hit the airline industry hard, and competition on the West Coast heated up. In response, Alaska progressively trimmed back its onboard meal service before finally switching to a buy-on-board meal model in 2006.

I chatted with Todd Traynor-Corey, the Managing Director of Guest Products at Alaska Airlines, about how Alaska plans meals for its passengers. Alaska still plans meals somewhat differently from many airlines, he says. Alaska likes to infuse seasonal flavors into its dining, so it still has a quarterly menu-planning session, compared to other carriers that might plan their menus for an entire year with just one or two cycle changes. A sample summer dish, he shared, would have strawberry rhubarb ice cream from the Portland, Oregon-based Salt & Straw, with cinnamon crumble.

The planning session comprises 100 to 175 dishes for First Class and Main Cabin, from snacks and lighter meals to full breakfast, lunch, and dinner entrees. The team evaluates how they look on the plate, taste, and importantly, how complicated it would be for caterers to source and load, and the ease of serving for the in-flight crews. Flight Attendants used to spend more time plating dishes in-flight, which he said could be difficult on shorter flights or during turbulence, so they worked with their catering partners to create dishes that required less prep time in-flight.

He also noted that some development goes on in the air. The team will take samples of coffee and wine onboard and test them in the in-flight environment, because the aircraft’s dry air and pressure mean food tastes differently than on the ground.

Getting Meals Out the Door

But once the meals are designed and planned, how do they get cooked, stored, delivered to the aircraft, and served?

For a glimpse behind the scenes, I visited the Cathay Dining facility at Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok International Airport. They take sanitation very seriously at the facility—we were swaddled head-to-toe in white jumpsuits, shoe covers, and face masks to be allowed in, and we couldn’t take any photos or videos while in the facility (because catering instructions from customer airlines—posted all over the facility—are proprietary).

It’s a massive facility, and it’s more than just a kitchen. There are also huge storage facilities for frozen, chilled, and dry goods, and washing facilities. When aircraft from Cathay Pacific or one of Cathay Dining’s contracted airline customers come in, the carts are offloaded on the big scissor trucks directly from the aircraft galleys. Trash from inbound international flights is heated before being disposed of to kill any foreign pathogens, and the carts and dishes are separated and sent through industrial washing machines to be cleaned and staged for their next flights.

There’s an entire room dedicated to fruit—and it smelled delightfully like it. Workers were clustered around tables speedily hand-slicing watermelons (to spec, of course) from a massive crate of them marked “imported from southern China.”

Another delightful-smelling room was the bakery, where bakers worked producing breads, muffins, pastries, and cakes for various airline customers, or staged pre-packaged bakery items for the airlines that preferred to source their own and send them to the facility instead of having them baked onsite.

Perhaps the most interesting process was the omelet machine, which can make about 6,000 omelets per day. The machine is a circular table lined with oiled frying pans, with eggs added as the table slowly turns. The omelets fry for about 60 seconds, then are flipped out of the pans directly into the thin metal casserole dishes, where they’ll be heated and served onboard. They’re also only cooked to about 75% done, so they won’t end up overcooked, since they’ll be chilled and reheated again before serving.

In another part of the facility, conveyor belts help workers assemble tray setups. Each worker might add cutlery, a bread roll, or a dessert to the tray before the worker at the end of the conveyor belt loads it into the cart. There are also conveyors for the casserole dishes themselves. We watched workers assemble breakfast dishes for MIAT Mongolian Airlines flights the next day, and I found myself thinking the meals looked so good it was almost an excuse to fly with them someday.

We were also led past cooking stations where chefs tended what seemed an army’s worth of food. At the massive grill station, a chef turned steaks over expertly, with the grill marks so neat they looked painted on. He was an expert with the tongs, working quickly on each steak, for he had several dozen to get through. At a nearby stir-fry station, another worker tossed a massive amount of shrimp noodles.

Many of the meals were for other airlines, but Hong Kong is also the main hub for hometown carrier Cathay Pacific, and their meal standards are exacting. In the airline’s earlier days, standardized menus were the aim, focusing on the cuisines of Hong Kong and Great Britain, which counted Hong Kong as a colony until 1997.

Now, Cathay has partnered with several Michelin-starred Hong Kong restaurants, including Louise and Duddell’s for First and Business Class meals, and Yat Tung Heen for Economy and Premium Economy meals. Cathay also focuses on “Chinese Classics” in Business Class, featuring meals from the Eight Great Cuisines of China. Cathay’s catering kitchens also have to produce meals that reflect the dietary restrictions and tastes of the airline’s global customers, from Halal to Kosher to Asian-style vegetarian.

Once the carts are loaded, Cathay Dining has an automated system. The cart is picked up on a ceiling-mounted hanger system called Power & Free, which keeps the carts chilled and moves them to the staging area where the trucks are loaded to take them to the aircraft. All told, the system can move 12,432 meals per hour.

Once onboard, meals are heated in convection steam ovens in virtually all cabins, although there are facilities for cooking eggs, toast, and rice to order onboard Cathay’s First Class cabins. The airline also offers on-demand dining between meal services, and more than a few flight attendants onboard mentioned that the airline’s burger, one of the available “anytime” items in Business Class, has its own devoted following among the airline’s frequent fliers. I even overheard several of the regulars ordering the burger instead of the regular Business Class meal.

Of course, there are logistical issues to deal with. Just accounting for the dishes is difficult enough, and airline meal planning takes that into account as well. If one of your tray setups includes a reusable hot beverage cup for coffee (like on a breakfast tray), then a tray setup on the return flight must be identical—even if it doesn’t exactly make sense for the meal period—otherwise your coffee cups start to pile up somewhere.

An Inflight Repast

Airline meals can be big business—especially for airlines like Cathay Pacific and Alaska Airlines, which use them as a point of differentiation. Cathay’s focus on meals is necessitated by its extensive long-haul network and fierce competition among Asian carriers—particularly on the quality of their food service. Alaska Airlines is also growing into the international long-haul market and will likely offer free hot meals in the Main Cabin on those flights—the first free hot meals to be served in Main Cabin by Alaska in nearly 20 years.

It’s almost a small miracle if you think about it. While you’re checking in online and getting your bags together for the flight, a team is busy preparing meticulously planned meals, putting together globally sourced ingredients onto plates that have just arrived from far-flung locales, been washed, and put right back into rotation to offer a restaurant-style meal thousands of miles away, seven miles up.

It’s kind of a feat—and oftentimes a memorably tasty one.