Food in the Air and Space

by Richard Foss

  The management at Virgin Atlantic obviously knew that passengers would steal the airplane-shaped salt and pepper shakers, which is why each was stamped “Pinched From Virgin Atlantic.”

  Image provided by Virgin Atlantic

  European governments kept propping up national carriers with subsidies, but in 1994 the system was destroyed by a set of EU court decisions that limited government support to airlines and airports. Though the first rulings were limited, requiring Air France and Greece’s Olympic Airlines to regard previous state aid as loans instead of grants, they sent shock waves through the industry.9 While private carriers complained that the decision didn’t go all the way to demanding immediate repayment, the decision forced the French government to lift restrictions that stopped competing carriers from serving the most desirable airports, and forced Air France to sell the hotel chain they owned and to privatize the airline. It was the first of many court cases that would doom state-owned carriers to choose privatization, merger, or bankruptcy.

  In the United States, where there had been no government control for decades, the heavily indebted major airlines had only two of those options. Those airlines that had assets to sell did so—United, which still owned the flight kitchens established by Don Magarell in 1936, sold them in 1993. The kitchens were highly profitable but the airline wasn’t, and the 140 million dollars United’s holding company received was needed to subsidize flight operations.10 The only major airline that kept their flight kitchens was Continental, which still treasured their reputation for high-quality food and wanted to retain control.

  That airline stumbled badly when they tried to match the cost cutters at their own game. In 1993 Continental created what they hoped would be a competitor to Southwest called “Continental Lite.” They removed the first-class seats, served only peanuts, and tried to emulate the fast airport turnarounds by rushing customers on and off the aircraft. It was a spectacular failure, alienating all their existing customers without bringing in many new ones, and it was dropped after only two years. It had been such a financial disaster that the airline brought in a new president, Gordon Bethune, who used a food metaphor when he told Texas Monthly, “You can make a pizza so cheap nobody will eat it, and you can make an airline so cheap nobody will fly it.”11 Bethune also shook up food service aboard Continental’s regular flights, overturning the previous management’s decision that food would not be served on flights of less than two hours, regardless of the flight time.

  In an article for the Harvard Business Review called “Right Away and All At Once: How We Saved Continental,” his partner in the strategy, chief operating officer Greg Brenneman wrote that they

  immediately started fixing our idiotic food policy. I don’t know about you, but to me, a two-hour flight that leaves at 7:00 a.m. (after I have gotten up at 5:00 a.m. to get to the airport and haven’t eaten breakfast) is a lot different from a two-hour flight at 2:00 p.m., which falls after lunch but before dinner. Customers told us they wanted and would pay for breakfast at 7:00 a.m. They may want food at 2:00 p.m., but they won’t pay for it. We changed our meal service with an eye toward what our competitors were doing. Now our service reflects time of day, length of haul, and class of service.

  In addition to changing when we served food, we also changed the food itself. Gone are the days when Continental put the meat, potato, and vegetable in a little ceramic dish and heated it until they all tasted the same. Nowadays, Gordon and I personally select the food we serve on our planes, and we test it ourselves every three months. You will find items like fresh pasta, soup and sandwiches, and freshly baked cinnamon rolls in first class, and Subway sandwiches and jelly beans in coach. We try to give everyone some brand quality with gourmet coffees and microbrewery beers. We’re not trying to be a four-star restaurant, just an airline that gives its customers something they’d be happy to pay for. And that’s the whole point of asking the customer in seat 9C the right question. In a turnaround situation—or any business situation, for that matter—you can’t afford to ask anything else.12

  Abandoning the attempt to be a cost cutter did save the airline, and within two years Continental went from being ranked last in customer satisfaction by J. D. Power and Associates to first. Amazingly, despite the fact that Continental’s “airline within an airline” strategy hadn’t worked, United Airlines copied it to create a carrier they called “Shuttle By United.”13 They did execute it better and operations were marginally profitable, but customers disliked it and it was eventually folded back into the rest of the airline.

  Other airlines tried to replicate the Southwest model and gained footholds in regional markets. ValuJet, Midway Airlines, Morris Air, and other carriers were briefly successful, but like so many others eventually failed or merged. One notable carrier bucked the trend. Midwest Express, an airline founded in 1984, became famous as an all-business-class airline serving high-quality meals and chocolate chip cookies baked on board. They almost immediately became the favorite corporate travel airline in America, and executives who had to fly to Chicago or New York were willing to make a change in Kansas City or Milwaukee to enjoy the 2 x 2 seating and full meals served on quality china. Though their services were wildly popular for over a decade, the airline was too small to survive as an independent and was eventually sold to Frontier, which gradually transitioned their services to standard economy.

  Worries about terrorism and a sharp spike in fuel prices during the Gulf War caused a stream of bankruptcies after 1992, including venerable carrier TWA. The airlines that survived cut back severely on meals, selling only cold items even on transcontinental service. The process accelerated after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the massive losses that resulted from the subsequent two-week shutdown of the entire US airline system. Operations restarted with the carriers burdened with new and costly security procedures, with metal knives and forks even in first class replaced with plasticware, and passengers shunning flying in favor of other modes of transportation.14

  To go into the whole long list of carriers that merged and shut down would be tiresome and repetitive. Suffice it to say that the same pattern was repeated everywhere: reduce the frequency and quality of meals. After 2003, when America West and Northwest introduced the practice, even major carriers started charging for them.15 William McGee, author of the book Attention All Passengers, a critique of the industry, summarized the situation in an interview with the travel magazine Roads and Kingdoms:

  Buy-on-board meals are now the standard on domestic flights, turning what was once a major expense into a profit center for airlines. It’s gone from hot meals to cold meals, cold meals to snacks. They conditioned us over time that our expectations should be lower and lower. What’s happened conversely at the same time is the quality of food in airports has increased tremendously, which is why a lot more people these days are brown bagging.16

  In a complete reversal from the days when airlines regarded their meals as part of their branding, Northwest started giving airline passengers discount coupons for Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC locations in airports, and United offered only McDonald’s children’s meals for young passengers on flights from Orlando. Many airlines allowed, and even encouraged, passengers to bring their own food. This caused problems for airline crews, who were suddenly faced with piles of randomly sized take-out boxes at the end of every flight instead of trays that fit neatly together. It also caused problems for passengers, because their fellow travelers did not make the calculation that airlines did regarding serving foods that smelled very strongly. Bon Appétit magazine ran a lengthy and hilarious rant by Jason Kessler called “I’m Sick of Stinky Food on Airplanes,” that read in part,

  Have you ever been in this position? You’re settling into a harrowing cross-country flight armed only with the in-flight magazine when someone sits down across the aisle from you holding a plastic take-out bag. It seems innocuous enough. Then, after you clear 10,000 feet, this stran
ger launches a full-on sensory attack. Turns out that plastic bag is filled with hazardous material: orange chicken from the fast food Chinese place in the terminal. Within 30 seconds, you’re gagging on the sickly sweet smell of processed sodium-filled meat nuggets. After two minutes, you’re thinking about an escape route. Ten minutes in, you’ve taken out your cell phone and are pretending to make calls just so the flight attendant will forcibly take you to the secret holding cell in the bottom of the airplane built expressly for people who attempt to make calls mid-flight. You didn’t know that holding cell existed, did you? Now you do.

  This scenario happened to me (sans prison) a few weeks ago—and it wasn’t the first time. Bringing and eating stinky food on board a plane is one of the most inconsiderate things you could possibly do to your fellow passengers. The air you breathe on that 747 is the same air that everyone else breathes because you’re literally in a steel tube suspended in the sky (which, when you think about it, is disconcerting enough). Those orange chicken molecules are being recycled over and over again until your brain makes a deal with your nose that it’s just going to ignore the problem.

  An airplane is not a mall. At the mall, you don’t have to sit there and take it when somebody nearby digs into a foul-smelling lunch. You can move. On an airplane, you don’t have that luxury. You’re essentially trapped.17

  Kessler was the magazine’s professional curmudgeon, but his griping touched a chord. The message boards at Airliners.net and the Flyertalk.com forum, which cater to frequent airline travelers, were filled with complaints about the decline of the passenger experience and the nuisance of dealing with people who brought garlic-laden dishes on board aircraft. They also brimmed with complaints about the lack of food service aboard airlines that were still trying to brand themselves as superior to the discounters. United had set up yet another low-fare subsidiary called TED, and in 2007 they stopped serving even pretzels aboard flights. A passenger on the Flyertalk forum posted,

  Does UA think that they are going to save their airline or make them profitable by taking away a small bag with a few pretzels for each passenger? Is UA not trying to distinguish itself as a “Premium” airline and try to make it so that people are willing to pay a premium to fly UA? I would like to hear how much this saves UA a year, because this is simply shocking. Come on, two hours can actually be quite a long flight. With taxi, boarding, and everything, it can be well into three hours gate to gate and now we get absolutely nothing? Please UA, PLEASE tack twelve cents onto my ticket price you ba$tard$.18

  Continental Airlines served up the industry’s last free economy-class meal in October 2010, just before merging with United. That merger made United the owner of flight kitchens again, since Continental had owned Chelsea Food Services, based in downtown Houston. Those kitchens, which United still owns, turn out first-class meals and meals for purchase for United and other domestic and international carriers. Two decades before this, a company that size would have found it difficult if not impossible to cater for United alone, but times had changed. Far from using Chelsea to build United’s brand and improve communication with their customers, United’s CEO Jeff Smisek indicated in an interview that the airline would consider using other caterers. “How much volume we do through them will depend on cost,” he explained in a 2010 interview with Bloomberg News.19

  During the same period in Europe, carriers that had just begun to recover from the Gulf War slowdown were slammed again by the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. Traffic fell by almost 30 percent that year and did not recover fully for almost five years.20 The slowdown and increased security costs hit established carriers at the same time that their long-opaque finances were scrutinized by increasingly activist EU authorities determined to prevent subsidies.21 State-owned airline after airline declared bankruptcy—Sabena, Swissair, Olympic, Malev, and many others. National airlines merged in ways that would have been unthinkable in an earlier age—Air France and KLM, two of the world’s oldest airlines that had been competitors since 1920, merged their management in 2004. They are now one carrier in all but name.

  The situation in which state-owned carriers were seen as utterly reliable while their private competitors were chancy was inverted—suddenly passengers looked at an airline’s balance sheet before paying for that advance booking. It was a boon for carriers that could boast that they were stable and profitable. Virgin Atlantic was one of these, and with founder Richard Branson’s usual genius for publicity, he even managed to turn a complaint letter about his airline’s food into a PR triumph. In 2008 a customer who had taken a flight from London to India sent a hilariously aggrieved letter to the airline’s management about the quality of the Indian-style meal. It was lavishly illustrated with photos of the unappetizing dishes, and reads in part,

  by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.

  “Look at this Richard. Just look at it: I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert [sic?]? You don’t get to a position like yours, Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert [sic?] with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert [sic?] with peas in? I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palate that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert [sic?] after all.”

  “The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.”22

  This letter would have never made it to the desks of most airline presidents, but Sir Richard Branson not only saw it, he phoned the passenger and invited him to visit Virgin’s London catering department to help select the food for future Virgin flights. The widely publicized letter, and Branson’s response to it, gave the world’s airline passengers a laugh at the same time as it bolstered the airline’s reputation for customer service.

  A few private carriers decided to see if the time was right for a higher level of passenger service than even Virgin, offering all-business-class long-haul flights. Silverjet flew from London to New York and Dubai, Maxjet from Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York to London, L’Avion from Paris to Newark, and Eos from New York to London. All won awards for the passenger experience, but Eos, which started in 2004 and went bankrupt in 2008, lasted the longest as an all-business-class carrier. Only one of this flock, Open Skies, continues to fly, though the airline was bought by British Airways. They now have three classes, and their service has degraded to the equivalent of other carriers.

  The last of the premium carriers was Eos Airlines, which flew between 2004 and 2008. This was the menu served on their final flight—the last supper for single-cabin luxury in the sky.

  Menu in author’s collection

  As of early 2014, the only European airlines that have improved economy-class service are charging for it. In May 2013 Latvia’s Air Baltic started allowing passengers to select from twenty different meal options at the time they book their tickets. The passenger’s selection is relayed to LSG Sky Chefs, the caterer they contract with, and the charge for the meal is put on the passenger’s credit card when the flight is booked.23 Air France and Austrian airlines copied the idea
later in the year, and other carriers are eyeing their experience. As this book goes to press, it looks like it may be the wave of the future.

  The only region in the world where free economy-class airline service did not greatly deteriorate between 1985 and the present day was in Asia, the last bastion of state-owned carriers. As William McGee put it in Roads and Kingdoms,

  As a general preemptive measure, fly Asian airlines as often as possible. “The coach service in Asian and Middle Eastern airlines is comparable to the business-class service you get from American carriers,” says William McGee. The Singapore girls will soak you in fruity Singapore Slings, All Nippon offers respectable soba and Japanese-style fried chicken to their coach passengers, and Korean Airlines boasts their own farm, which provides the building blocks for their legendary bibimbap.

  While an increasing number of private airlines are serving Asia, these are generally forced by competitive pressures to maintain the same standard of service as their state-owned counterparts. There is no equivalent of the European Union’s regulations against subsidies, so for now, at least, there are still routes where an economy passenger may enjoy a decent meal.

  For the elite passengers in first and business class, the choices worldwide have actually expanded even as their number has declined. In 2012 a Wall Street Journal article stated that of the over five hundred aircraft flying to Europe, Asia, and South America, just 27 percent offered any first-class seats.24 These are increasingly filled with passengers who are using frequent flyer miles to upgrade, but the airlines pile on the amenities anyway. A la carte dining (included in the fare, naturally), dining at the time of your choice, and meals designed by celebrity chefs have become standard amenities.