Airlines are selling plane food directly to “people who miss flying”, in order to shift surplus
see the food as one of the least palatable aspects of air travel. Rubiyanto Haliman is not most travellers. A worker at an Indonesian shrimp hatchery who flew four to six times a month before the pandemic, he collects in-flight menus, magazines and tumblers, and likes to post pictures of aeroplane food to his Instagram feed—not in an ironic way. The past few months, with airlines largely grounded, have been difficult for him.
Garuda is not the only Asian airline to flog its food to the land-lubbing public. Santan, owned by AirAsia, a big low-cost carrier, sells two Malay staples,and beef rendang at its main hub in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Thai Airways offers stir-fried tiger prawns and tandoori lamb chops in Bangkok. Hong Kongers can pick up $5 “stir-fried beef strip” and “Indian curry fish” from Cathay Pacific’s catering arm.
Santan began dishing up its food on the ground in December, when it opened a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur as part of a branding exercise. Most airline caterers pivoted to terrestrial retail after the pandemic forced the industry to make a hard landing. In June, a trade body, forecast that the global air-transport industry’s revenues will fall by half this year.
The grub is flying off the trolleys. Santan sells about 700 meals a day; SnapFresh roughly twice that. In June Gate Gourmet sold out.Aerofood is so pleased with “Fly with Meals”, as it calls its retail wing, that it is opening restaurants in three big Indonesian cities. It is a far cry from the 80,000-90,000 meals that Garuda normally serves each day, but it helps.
Reviews, however, are mixed. Zhenyu Wang, a software developer based in Brisbane, Australia, bought a ten-pack from Gate Gourmet not because he is a fan of plane food but because, at $1.80 per meal, it was a bargain. The Italian pasta was “no good” and the beef oily and salty. Too bad he didn’t get Gate Gourmet’s chicken mango curry. Scott Hamilton, anworker in Sydney, enjoyed it so much, he says, that “I would consider flying to somewhere just to eat this.
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