The airline meal tray business is booming on the ground!

As far back as we can remember, we’ve never seen anyone rave about an airline meal. Ranging at best between “not bad” and “good”, and rarely overwhelming in terms of quantity, the airline meals are generally not the first thing you regret when you can no longer travel.

But strange as it may seem, as the pandemic continues to reduce passenger traffic to a trickle, these famous meal are finding new outlets on the ground, with customers eager to rediscover an experience they’ve been deprived of for far too long.

Your favourite airline’s dishes available at the supermarket!

From April 15, Thais will be able to find Thai Airways signature dishes in supermarkets across the country, including chicken biryani and shrimp pork.

But the Thai airline is not the first to enter this niche. Before it, Finnair offered a selection of dishes from its business menu for sale in supermarkets. These include their most popular signature dishes, combining Japanese and Nordic cuisines.

Cathay Pacific won’t be selling to supermarkets, but will be selling dishes at discount prices to people working at Hong Kong airport!

As for Qantas, it simply sold its stock of wine bottles and mignonettes.

Airline suppliers seek new outlets

When airlines don’t do it themselves, their suppliers do.

For example Aerofood ACS, the business that supplies Garuda, began selling its dishes directly to the general public, due to a lack of opportunities with airlines ! As for Gate Gourmet which supplies Qantas and 21 other airlines in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, has started selling to private customers by click and collect, directly from its factories. At $2 a dish, success is guaranteed.

GNS Nuts, which supplies American Airlines with peanuts, found itself with 50,000 pounds (22 tons) of unsold bags and began selling them online.

When airlines enter the restaurant business

But that’s not all: some airlines have opened more or less temporary restaurants.

Thai, again, was already operating a restaurant at Phuket airport and realized that there was a real market. So, in the midst of the pandemic, the company opened a restaurant on the second floor of its Bangkok headquarters, serving a selection of the best dishes on the menu…and at the same cost. Expect to pay between $3 and $5 per dish.

In search of new revenues, but not only

Many may wonder why such a move was made. Pleasing the nostalgic, staying in touch with the customer…yes. But that doesn’t explain everything.

We understand that the airlines were left with huge inventories that had to be sold off. In fact, we’ve seen some of them selling pyjamas, face and hand creams, comfort kits… But why did they keep on going once the stocks had run out?

Not all countries are as generous as France in terms of business support and short-time working, so it was necessary to continue finding new sources of income. It was also necessary to keep the production tools running, even at reduced capacity, as stopping everything and then restarting would have been astronomically expensive and time-consuming. Finally, it was a question of keeping employees at work simply to preserve know-how and avoid having to rehire people to be trained from scratch.

The question is whether, given their success (which has yet to be confirmed), certain initiatives will continue once the crisis is over.

Ah, I almost forgot a detail. Indeed, the unbeatable prices on offer have certainly created a market, which consumer food professionals are unlikely to welcome: accustomed as they are to more comfortable margins, this is not the kind of competition they’re going to appreciate. But now that passengers know the true price of the food they’re servedAre they going to agree to pay “buy on board” at the price offered to them? Will they find that the abolition of free services is not designed to serve them better, but to make penny-pinching savings? ….

In October, Singapore Airlines opened an ephemeral restaurant on board an A380!

Image : Airline meal by g_dasha via Shutterstock