Airplane Food

Over the course of her career as a chef, Molly Brandt has had all kinds of prestigious jobs.

BRANDT: I basically worked in every part of the restaurant industry from, you know, large-scale hotels, to private hotels, Michelin-star restaurants, to cruise lines, to my own catering business.

But today, she works on dishes that aren’t often in the spotlight.

BRANDT: I am the Innovation Chef for North America for Gategroup.

Gategroup is the parent company of Gategourmet, one of the largest in-flight catering companies. It makes food that’s served on airplanes all over the world. When you hear the words “airplane” and “food” in the same sentence, you might think of rubbery meat, flavorless pasta, and a wilted salad served on a plastic tray.

BRANDT: Airline food is the butt of all the jokes, right? And I fully understand that. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We want to move the needle in airline catering. We wanna make it a little bit more interesting. 

But making food that tastes good at 35,000 feet is harder than it might seem.

BRANDT: We’re fully cooking, we’re chilling down, and then plating cold. And then it goes up into the aircraft and it gets heated up again. That makes it very challenging to make food, let’s say, multi-dimensional. 

KINSELLA: Every second counts. I know it sounds cliche, but in this business we always have to be on time. We always have be there when we’re supposed to. The food, the napkins, the glasses, all of that has to be perfect out of the kitchen.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: airplane food.

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To understand why modern-day airline food is, well, the way it is, you first have to understand how food ended up on planes to begin with.

Early commercial airplanes in the 1920s generally accommodated fewer than 20 people, and couldn’t handle much extra weight. Food was usually cold sandwiches and fruit — and passengers were often served their meals in an airplane hangar during a refueling stop. In the late 1930s, carriers like Pan American and United Airlines began to elevate the dining experience, with broiled chicken and Delmonico potatoes. Promotional advertisements from the era positioned airline food as a luxury.

AIRLINE AD: Here’s the flying kitchen we’ve been hearing about, with a charming stewardess to make your lunch more delightful. A tasty lunch on a personal tray. Is it any wonder American Airways planes have become famous for delicious food? This is travel deluxe!

DE SYON: I’m Guillaume de Syon. I’m a professor of history at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania.

De Syon has studied the cultural history of air travel. And he says it wasn’t until after World War Two that that commercial flight — and the quality of the food on-board — really began to take off.

DE SYON: The flights become longer, and you can now start crossing the Atlantic, for example. It’s wonderful, you see the clouds, you see the sea, and you start getting really, really bored.

In the days before in-flight movies and Wi-Fi, food was used as a form of entertainment. Food with a generous side of booze.

DE SYON: Flight attendants had instructions. You can give as much as you want to the passengers. There’s no limit, so long as they don’t become rowdy. And the whole point was to serve them, of course, the aperitif, the wine with dinner, and then of course a little, you know, pouce café, a port, or something like that. The trick was to then jack up the heat. You send everybody to sleep.

For several decades, airplane food enjoyed a golden age.

DE SYON: The idea was to have a whole course that you might have at a very fine restaurant, be it in Paris or New York. Flight attendants get special training in how to carve a roast. How to serve the salad, where to place the mayonnaise, et cetera, et cetera. All of these things are elaborately designed.

There was almost no limit to the spread you could find on airplanes — roast beef, baked ham, leg of lamb, lobster tails French pastries, and Boston cream pie. On a Concorde jet flight, passengers could expect a 6-course meal with steak, caviar, and champagne — all served on fine China plates and white tablecloths.

AIRLINE AD: No, this isn’t one of those tempting glossy magazine illustrations, it’s just one of the many delicious items served on board. 

But things began to change in 1978, when the airline industry was deregulated. Up until this point, airline fares were fixed by the federal government. After deregulation, carriers had more liberty in what they could charge. Airlines started enticing customers with low prices, rather than amenities like food.

DE SYON: This is when you start seeing the low-cost carriers that begin to introduce very low fares, very uncomfortable seats, but you still occasionally can get some food on board or you have to buy it.

As ticket prices declined, planes also got bigger. More and more people started to fly. And airlines faced a conundrum: they had to produce more food at a lower price point.

As a result, the industry entered an era of intense cost-cutting — and food was a primary target. In one case, Robert Crandall, then the CEO of American Airlines, famously removed one olive from every dinner salad served on the plane. It saved the airline $40,000 a year.

DE SYON: The realization is that, you know, maybe we shouldn’t have this extra olive or that extra little grape tomato. And so these are the beginnings of massive worldwide economic slowdown in terms of airline food.

Today’s airplane meals are prepared in massive quantities in kitchens near airports. There was a time when major airline carriers operated their own kitchens. But these days, most of them outsource the work to private airline catering companies. They design the recipes, order the ingredients, cook all of the food, and transport meals to the airplanes on the tarmac. One of the largest of these companies is Gategourmet, a subsidiary of Gategroup.

KINSELLA: We have pretty much customers of all the major airlines that you can think about, whether they’re in North America, South America, APAC, the Middle East, Europe.

Chris Kinsella is the chief commercial officer for North America at Gategroup. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and owned by Singaporean private equity firms. Globally, it takes in more than $6 billion dollars in revenue — a substantial portion of which comes from its airline catering arm. They serve around 650 million passengers on more than 3.8 million flights every year.

KINSELLA: We operate in 200 plus locations, 60 countries, six continents.

Gategourmet, and other large airline catering companies like it, have multi-year contracts in place with the big carriers, like Delta, United, and Virgin Atlantic. They put in bids for the right to produce food for certain routes — say, San Francisco to New York, or Chicago to Boston. The terms of these contracts are secret, but we do know that airlines spend a considerable amount of money on food. United Airlines, for example, has an annual food budget of around $2 billion dollars to serve some 60 million meals to its premium passengers. That works out to around $33 bucks per meal. Kinsella says that every airline’s budget is different. But most of them tend to be hyper-vigilant about the cost of their food.

KINSELLA: The airline business, it’s very cyclical. The airlines have to have a tight hand on their costs and the money that they’re able to spend with food and beverage. Lemons and limes on an aircraft, olives in a salad, tomatoes in a salad. We are literally counting pennies with the airline on some of these items because, when you’re catering airlines at the size and scale that Gategourmet does, it’s massive. So any change in pennies can yield thousands of dollars of savings.

This penny counting has an impact on the types of dishes that end up on airplane menus. But the challenges of serving food at 35,000 feet go far beyond economics.

KINSELLA: The conditions are different than your typical restaurant. It’s difficult to execute under the environment when you have so many different variables at the airport. 

That’s coming up.

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The journey to get your food onto an airplane begins months in advance, in the home kitchen of someone like Molly Brandt.

BRANDT: I have years of magazine tearouts. I have an enormous, enormous and growing collection of cookbooks. One of my favorite things to look at are old archive church cookbooks. You can find some real gems back there that will give people the sense of, like — joy.

As Gategourmet’s innovation chef, Brandt has to come up with airline meal recipes. It’s a job that comes with limitations. Inside of an airplane cabin, the humidity level can be, quite literally, drier than a desert. And as the plane climbs in altitude, the air pressure drops. These conditions reduce the sensitivity of our taste buds by up to 30 percent for salty foods. Some airline caterers counter this by adding more salt to their meals. And Guillaume De Syon, the professor, says many passengers dump even more salt on the plate to make the food less bland.

DE SYON: Your meal is not going to be healthy on board. Say you are in fact one of the lucky people who can get a steak in business class, okay? They bring it to you right away because of course you don’t want it to dry too much. You are going to put extra sauce on that thing, or it’s gonna have extra pepper and salt no matter what. Because, in fact, it’s the only way you’re gonna be able to taste it. I wouldn’t blame the airlines or the caterers. We like to taste our food, and that’s the way we remedy it when we’re at that altitude.

But Brandt says there are other ways to create flavorful dishes for the air.

BRANDT: I do not add more salt. I want to have a balanced dish. So I like to make sure that there is acid and sweetness and spice and a little bitterness. I like to incorporate umami wherever I can because it is kind of on the same path as that saltiness, right? It’s a savory thing. And when you’re in that pressurized environment and you are dehydrated, there’s this craving for this savory flavor. I’ll hide mushrooms in things. Mushrooms can make beef taste so much beefier. I will also lean on shio koji. So, koji is a mold that is responsible for making miso, soy sauce, all kinds of these different flavors. And it is an enzyme that acts as a tenderizer, which is, like, double benefit, in my experience.

As well as compensating for the effects of the cabin environment, Brandt has to design meals that can withstand temperature changes. Airline meals are fully cooked, then chilled, before they’re loaded onto the airplane, where they’re reheated in convection ovens. Some kinds of food simply can’t withstand this ordeal.

BRANDT: So, think about the things that, if you went out to eat, and then you said, “I’m full, I would like to take that home’ — how does it do the next day? That burger probably isn’t going to reheat that well. Keeping things kind of crispy, for example, like fries. So when we go out to eat, say, a fried breaded chicken cutlet, and it comes with a really fresh vegetable salad on top? Really impossible to do that, okay? If I need inspiration, and I’m not lying, I will walk through the frozen food section of a grocery store because, basically, these challenges that we’re talking about are the same challenges that frozen food companies have to overcome. 

After Brandt comes up with something the airline likes, it goes to a team of design chefs and supply managers, who engineer the concept into something that can be made affordably in very large volumes. From there, it’s a matter of logistics — cooking and prepping thousands of meals for hundreds of flights every day. At Gategourmet’s kitchens, the catering team will receive a flight schedule from an airline a few weeks in advance. This tells them which flights they’re scheduled to serve, the model of the plane, and how many of each dish to prepare.

BRANDT: Let’s say you’re the cook and you’re making the sea bass to the proper internal temperature. And then it goes into a blast chiller. Must cool down to a certain degree within a certain period of time. From there, it gets a label, because it’s for a specific dish, for a specific aircraft, for a specific route. Then it gets wrapped and it goes on a tray, and then the trays go on the aircraft carts. And then all of these carts, still in the refrigerated area, get corralled with everything else that needs to go on that flight.

These carts are loaded onto special trucks that zip across the tarmac and load up the airplanes. Once a plane is in the air, it’s the flight crew’s responsibility to reheat the meals in on-board convection ovens and serve them to passengers — mostly in business and first class.

BRANDT: When it comes to plating, from the flight attendant’s perspective, we basically pre-portion everything for them and there’s like a plating guide. So your sauce might be in like a little foil cup next to the chicken in a foil pan, next to another foil cup that contains whatever other vegetable or side. And it all gets heated up. And then they’re basically just using a spoon and the foil cup to put it on the plate.

Once the food is on a plane, it’s out of the catering company’s control. But it’s their responsibility to make sure all of those passengers who are captive up in the sky don’t get sick from their offerings.

DE SYON: You want something that is guaranteed not to make the passengers fall sick. Some of us may have seen the old movies or the satire movies about, “Oh, shoot, the captain ate the fish. Here we go. In a crash.” But there’s some truth to that. You don’t want a massive case of 200 poisonings because something was not prepared properly. 

Gategourmet goes to great lengths to avoid scares like this. But they still don’t have a perfect track record. In 2004, 45 passengers flying out of Honolulu got food poisoning after reportedly eating contaminated carrots prepared by the caterer. And in 2017, FDA inspectors found numerous health infractions at one of the company’s facilities in Kentucky. Gategourmet has since addressed these violations. But, as with all food, the possibility of bacteria is always there. Chris Kinsella, Gategroup’s chief commercial officer for North America, says pilots are often served different meals than everyone else on board, just in case.

KINSELLA: In the sheer and rare chance that there’s a concern with the food, it’s important that they get a different meal because they’re operating the aircraft.

Kinsella says safety is especially top of mind during a flight delay. If food has already been loaded onto a plane, the time to retrieve it is limited.

KINSELLA: On any given day, there’s weather that affects the operation of an airline at a basic level. So we’re constantly monitoring when there is a delay. Sometimes a flight is canceled, and it’s just the nature of the business. So that food is brought back to the facility and all of the shelf stable items, all the commissary items, those are segregated and separated. And then sometimes that food is unable to be consumed. So, unfortunately, in an effort to keep everybody safe, that gets disposed of.

Of course, these days, complimentary airplane meals are mostly reserved for first-class and business-class passengers. On the majority of domestic flights in the United States, people in economy no longer get hot food — unless they want to pay extra for it on board. And even when they do buy it, it’s not the same fare the first-class folks are getting.

BRANDT: It is 100 percent not the same food. There is a significant dollar difference between what is spent in business class or economy. And the more you pay for that ticket, the higher expectation it is for the product. 

KINSELLA: There’s a little bit more room for a higher quality, more improved offering in the business class. You see that there’s a real focus on those type of passengers in those premium cabins these days with food. In economy, depending on who you’re flying, customers that may not get a full complimentary hot meal. But international versus domestic travel, short haul versus long haul — the amount of time you’re in that cabin, then the airlines can spend a little bit more and still offer something that’s satisfying, even in the economy cabin.

Most of us non-first-class plebes have to make due with a tiny bag of pretzels and, if we’re lucky, a Biscoff cookie. But Guillaume de Syon says he, for one, isn’t jealous when he gets a whiff of the fish at the front of the plane.

DE SYON: People like to complain about this or that. The food, I mean, you like it, you don’t like it. You decline it. It’s a cliché, but we do get what we pay for. And I’m very happy with my cheap ticket. And if it means I get some not-so-appetizing food, so be it.

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

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This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. And thanks to listeners Lucy Limesand and Sam Walker for suggesting this topic. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to email us at everydaythings@freakonomics.com. Our inbox is always open. All right, until next week.

CROCKETT: So when you look out the window at the terminal and see those little trucks rocketing across the runway, our food could be in there somewhere?

KINSELLA: They’re going at a safe speed, Zach. But absolutely.