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How Gourmet In-Flight Meals Are Made at the World's Largest Airline Catering Facility
Writer Ramsey Qubein visits the Qatar Airways' catering facility in Doha, where tens of thousands of airline meals are made from scratch daily.
By Ramsey Qubein
The pandemic has caused us all to make complicated decisions around travel. Airlines are no exception, especially when it comes to deciding what to do with things like in-flight meals. Too much food and drink, and people remain maskless; too little, and they get hungry and grouchy. Plus, cabin crew have to feel safe while serving it.
For some of the largest airlines, daily catering operations are massive undertakings, and were even before COVID-19. To get a closer look at how one airline handles feeding thousands of daily fliers, I traveled to Doha's Hamad International Airport to explore what is considered to be the world's largest airline catering facility under one roof, Qatar Airways Catering Company. With 16 hot kitchens, an in-house lab to test food safety, and a warehouse stocked with everything from sugar packets to toilet paper, Qatar Airways has in-flight service down to a science.
As someone fascinated with aviation, getting a behind-the-scenes peek at how one airline handles onboard food and drink was particularly exciting—but let's be honest, if you're preparing 200,000 meals a week, 24 hours a day, and mostly from scratch, it's an impressive feat for anyone to behold. Wearing head-to-toe protective gear (including a hair net and covers for my shoes), I spent several hours investigating exactly how your airplane meal gets from the prep kitchen to your tray in under 24 hours.
It's a farmer's market of produce
The Qatar Airways' catering facility uses as much fresh produce as possible. What the kitchen receives in the morning will be sliced, diced, baked, and served by the same evening. Each day, the facility uses more than 165,000 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables, going through 22,000 pounds of potatoes alone. The airline is the largest buyer of butter, eggplants, potatoes, and onions in all of Qatar. Each vegetable must be washed, sanitized, peeled, chopped, and sliced by hand.
Instead of canned products, the ingredients are all fresh, including for economy class meals. In fact, nearly 50,000 salads are prepared daily for economy passengers alone. The facility also uses nearly 22,000 pounds of chicken breast and 33,000 pounds of rice per day, and even makes its own fresh pasta on site.
Within the catering plant, there's an intense focus on creating a pristine environment in the name of hygiene and food safety. For example, there are no cardboard boxes allowed inside the facility because they can carry contaminants or pests. Whatever comes boxed—including everything from bottled water and air freshener to carrots and lettuce—must be transferred into approved and pre-washed bins.
A chef-operated conveyor belt for omelets
No matter what the meal being prepared, portions are controlled carefully to assure that each tray or dish has the same amount. (You wouldn't want to see your seat neighbor eating a bigger slice of cake than you, after all._ For economy meals, the staff pours food into the containers you see on your tray. Business-class meals are often placed in different containers that the crew heat up and plate on board for better presentation. Machines monitor the weight to avoid waste before packaging and sealing as many as 37 hot meals per minute.
The airline's catering facility produces an astonishing 66 different meal options just for economy class each day. This includes special meals like low-sodium, diabetic, and children's options plus destination-specific dishes like curries bound for India, for a rough total of 4,000 special meals per day.
An entire section of the facility is devoted to the bakery where freshly baked bread, croissants, pastries, cakes, and other sweet creations are produced. The temperature is carefully controlled since the yeast in bread, for example, can cause it to collapse before it gets to the plane.
Having your own bakery has its perks. For instance, after noticing that the crackers it was serving on flights were not very popular with passengers, the airline ditched the provider and started baking its own.
The airline even has its own omelet station. Rather than buying them frozen, Qatar uses a circular conveyor belt contraption that can produce 18,000 omelets per day destined for both business and economy class. Chefs crack eggs into each pan then sauté and flip them as the belt goes round to produce dozens of fluffy omelets every few minutes.
From the catering warehouse to the plane
Once meals are ready, the finished product is chilled to around 40 degrees for food safety purposes. These are loaded onto trolleys aggregated into groups depending on the flight. before they are loaded onto special trucks bound for planes.
The carts are bulky and heavy, and the right carts need to be loaded into specific sections of the plane for flight attendants to access them on board. There is a lot to move to each plane. For example, a Boeing 777 aircraft will have as much as 9,000 pounds of catering equipment.
On board, flight attendants then reheat meals in ovens before serving; in business class, they follow special instructions to plate the individual components of the meal on dishware much like in a restaurant.
Historical trends help the airline know how much of each meal to load. Flights to India, for example, might carry a greater quantity of vegetarian options than a flight to South America. Historical data shows that passengers on certain flights are likely to eat more than on others.
For example, Qatar's flights to Australia see fewer people eating breakfast before landing because their body clocks are simply not ready to eat at that hour. Over time, the airline gathers these statistics to help it better plan its catering.
The airline goes through 12 million liters of bottled water per year and 3.2 million bottles of white wine, all of which is stored in its warehouse.
Serving a gourmet meal at 35,000 feet is no easy task, and staying fresh and relevant for frequent travelers is key. Long-haul menus change every two to three months. On routes with more frequent fliers, like on its flights between Middle Eastern cities, menus change weekly.
It's not just food either
The catering facility handles all onboard items including pillows, blankets, hot towels, condiments, amenity kits, and even pajamas for first- and business-class passengers. These all must be packed and sorted according to destination. Flights to China and India consume more (and specific kinds of) tea than, say, a flight to the United States. Flights to North America require larger sizes of pajamas for passengers than what the airline sends to other destinations.
The facility handles its own laundry, too, assembling blankets and linens from old flights then cleaning, folding, and packaging them. The slower the cleaning time, the more inventory the airline needs to buy, so the carrier's decision to take laundry in-house is cost-effective. Machines launder, fold, and seal blankets (although the thicker business class duvets are folded by hand). Every two minutes, the facility cleans 88 pounds of blankets, and the machines regularly fold more than 286,000 pounds of blankets a day.
Even with so much inventory, the stock is constantly depleting itself with thousands of blankets mysteriously "disappearing" on flights and some linens needing to be discarded due to makeup stains. The staff has to keep an eye out for such marks so as not to reuse something that appears dirty.
Dealing with delays or other issues
Qatar Airways is not immune to product shortages, noting that many items like toilet paper, watermelon, and pineapple have recently been delayed on container ships. Fruits are one thing, but you sure can't send a flight off without toilet paper.
I was shocked by how large the warehouse is since it stores every component of what makes a flight comfortable for passengers. Everything from toothpicks to liquor bottles comes in huge bulk amounts. When one item is hard to restock (like sugar or tissues), it can disrupt the entire flow of the facility.
As for what happens when a flight is delayed? It really depends on how long the delay lasts. After a certain period of time, the food will spoil and need to be replaced. Operating such long flight sectors, it simply is not possible to send a plane on 15+ hour flights without any food or drinks.
The catering facility must also take into account that people often switch to different flights or upgrade to business class at the last-minute, which can alter the number of meals it needs to make. There's a specific team dedicated to managing last-minute changes to passenger loads and delays.
On another floor, trucks unload hundreds of serving carts filled with refuse from inbound flights. The staff sorts through meal trays by hand to recycle what they can, discard waste or leftover food, and sanitize every item before it begins another global journey.
Airline food may be an easy punch line, but it possibly deserves a bit more credit after all.
TopicsAirlines
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