Making Airline Food Catering Safe through Food Tech
Brining visibility, auditability, and safety to the food up in the air.
Flying can be an adventure to some or just a means of transportation to others. The average person takes 6.5 flights per year [2]. Most of them happing around the summer months [1]. In Singapore’s Changi Airport around 7,400 flights arrive or depart each week.
What is one of the luxuries you can have while on a plane? Well, food and drinks. This article explores how using food tech airlines can work with food catering businesses to ensure that every meal delivered will be safe to eat.
Cooking on the ground
Before the meals get to your airplane seat they are cooked on the ground by a food catering company. Surprised to find out the airlines don’t cook their food? Due to airline safety and regulations; the air hostesses are not allowed to cook in the plane. Because of this, the airlines hire food catering companies to cook the food, put it in trollies, and load it up into the plane. These food caterers cook the food in bulk, from starting from 100 meals up to 10,000 dishes at once. As you can expect many airlines cater to their dishes depending on your final destination. But every meal has the basic components: an entree, a main dish, a small desert, and of course, the bread rolls. Did you know that 72 Million bread rolls were served by Emirates Airlines in 2018? (Business Insider)
Typically the caterer will have two types of kitchens, a cold one (around -10 to +5ºC) and a hot one (around +20ºC to +30ºC). The purpose of this is to ensure that at the specific steps of the dish cooking the temperature will prevent the growth of bacteria in the dish. Making temperature monitoring an important item before the meal is even created. If you have an appetizer like a salad, a batch of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber will be cut and prepare. Then the chefs will weight every dish while assembling them. Once finished they will be put in a freezer to keep it fresh and cold. When cooking a protein-based main dish, this will be first cooked and weighted before being assembled into its final form. Think of a chicken rice main dish. When it is prepared, it will then be flash-frozen to preserve its flavor and prevent bacteria from growing. Food caterers under strict regulations cannot serve food that has been out in ambient temperature for longer than 4 hours. Thus, freezing the food keeps it ready to be served.
Finally, every single meal tray is prepared and placed in a trolly where it is then put in a refrigerated container to be delivered to the airline.
Ready to board for the hungry passengers
What would happen if your 17-hour flight from Singapore to San Francisco gets a delay? There is a specific time that food safety administration allows for the food to be on hold in the refrigerated containers at the airport. A special team must come in and assess if the food is still good for consumption. Can you imagine what will happen if all the passengers of a Boeing 737 flight get food poisoning? You can expect just about everything, from outrage in social media to a visit from your friendly health inspector. It is because of this that monitoring from the preparation process to flight on boarding is crucial. This allows the food caterer to have visibility in their food chain. In essence, ensuring that they know what happens to every meal on every flight.
The cost of a meal up in the air: unit economics
The estimated cost on domestic flight economy meals is USD 7.30 and USD 10.50 in international. Meaning in an international flight from Taipei to San Fransisco the total average cost of the meals is USD 3,297 (based on a Boeing 737–800 aircraft size with 157 passengers). On average a food caterer can create 10,000 meals a week. In a year making more than 157,000 meals with all types of protein, chicken, seafood, pork, etc.
The TEMPHAWK solution allows for temperature and humidity monitoring from the kitchen to the aircraft. Providing auditable records and instant alerts if the temperature is rising affecting the food’s perishableness. This customer complies with strict food regulations in Singapore such as HACCP and ISO 22,000 with this solution. At the same time having a scalable system to deploy across multiple airline orders.
This is part one of the farm, manufacturing, and warehouse series exploring how IoT data analytics can have a positive impact on traditional businesses.
Learn More at the TEMPHAWK www.temphawk.net
Follow our use cases series @ FOX-TECH in the food value chain Publication
References
[1] Li, Jiaxiang (2008). My Way The Eight Strategies of Air China Towards Success. China: Cengage Learning. p. 241. ISBN 978–981–4239–58–5.
[2]Around the World in 50 hours: Average person takes 6.5 flights per year. (2018, August 28). Retrieved from https://www.traveller24.com/News/Flights/around-the-world-in-50-hours-average-person-takes-65-flights-per-year-20180828
