Followup: Food catering
Nitin Gupta
a bit of mis-information surfaced recently about airlines' contracting
food service to outside vendors. the august 1994 Frequent Flyer magazine
has an interesting article about this. the major players:
1. Dobbs International is the country's largest inflight caterer. Owned by
Dial Corp.
2. Caterair International is second. Formerly owned by Marriott.
3. Shy Chefs is in third. Estimated worth: $400M.
some interesting tidbits:
"These menus are rotated every two weeks, but must always be coordinated
with Dobbs kitchens elsewhere so you don't get the same meal coming home
as you got when you left."
"The challenge of coordinating this wild melange of meals begins with the
airlines, each of which employs chefs to design inflight meals,
occasionally in consultation with such culinary luminaries as Wolfgang
Puck, Dean Fearing, Larry Forgione, and Paul Prudhomme. These menus are
then put out for bids from inflight kitchens such as Dobbs in each city
the airline serves."
"In the inflight catering business, rules abound. Some regulations come
from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), others from the Federal
Aviation Administration. (Rule Number One: The flight crew must be served
food different from that of the passengers, and each crew member must be
served something different. The reason? Your safety. In the rare event
that tainted food is served, not all members of the flight drew will be
felled simultaneously, so there's always somebody healthy enough to fly
the plane. Chew on that for a while.) Other rules come from the caterers."
"Food preperation starts eight hours or so before a flight departs, with
cold food production beginning at 10pm. During the nine-hour shift, the
cooks prepare breakfast and start lunch for the next day's flights. The
next shift begins as the first shift departs, staying on to finish lunch
orders and complete dinner by 3:30 in the afternoon."
"Specific dishes to be prepared each day are determined by a printout of
each airline's requirements, which Dobbs receives from carriers 24 hours
before each plane's departure. If a dish is to be cooked in quantity, a
supervisor first whips up a sample and covers it in plastic. Cooks then
prepare food identical to the supervisor's. In fact, they do it on an
assembly line."
"But here's the main complication: The inevitable last-minute flight
cancellation. Airlines send Dobbs "final" printouts of meal requirements
six hours before flight time, and Dobbs monitors airline reservations
systems for four hours more, watching for changes in the passenger count.
But that last-second flight cancellation invariably leads to massive
rebookings, dumping Dobbs's best-laid plans into the shredder."
blue skies
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Nitin Gupta MIT NanoStructures Laboratory
ngu...@nano.mit.edu NeXT Mail Encouraged 617 253 0722
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