Airplane Food Is the Future of Ready-Made Meals

Dining at 40,000 feet isn't very showbiz.

Peeling back the foil cover, poking curiously at what's inside, taking that first experimental forkful, and finishing the lot because you can't get up isn't everybody's idea of fun. For better or worse, it has sparked a million of Jerry Seinfeld's "Hey, airline food, what's the deal with that?" jokes.

There are plenty of people who think that check-in dining might not all be shit, though. In fact, there are companies poised and ready to give nuked-chicken-and-obliterated-green-bean-loving diners everything they desire. Berlin-based company All You Need has started actually delivering Lufthansa's inflight meals to willing, paying customers. That's right.

The Air Food One scheme delivers business-class food that people at home can then cook in the oven. While it might seem incredible that someone would pay to eat airline food outside of a jumbo jet, company spokesperson Max Thinius took a long-distance call to tell us about the appeal of long-haul dinners. Isn't eating plane food at home a bit… weird?

"You're the same as me, you're travelling in the wrong class!" he says. "We're getting lots of potential customers calling us up, giving their frequent flyer number, and saying they want to have it at home."

Wait—they're calling because they like the food on airplanes so much? "Yeah, they just really love it," Thinius beams. "Most of our customers are busy professionals or working parents, so it's a quick way of ordering food online and getting it delivered to you." Fingers crossed the delivery staff are dressed like air hostesses.

"I think people see it and think, This isn't the typical pre-cooked convenience food I get elsewhere. It's based on Lufthansa's first-class and business-class menus, so it's all freshly made on the day and you just put it in the oven."

Thinius believes that only an airline has the kind of resources necessary to roll out a big scheme like this. "This is the pre-pilot scheme and I could see it catching on and other people doing it," he says, "but I don't think you could do a big delivery service like this without a major airline."

He's right. Airlines are—or are at least supposed to be—the very epitome of efficiency and of budgeting know-how. In one year alone, American Airlines saved $40,000 by removing a single olive from each of their in-flight salads. LSG Sky Chefs make an astonishing 15,000 bread rolls every hour. The meals are rigorously tested up to six months in advance of your flight, so they are, ostensibly, the best version of themselves that they can be. Whether you, the diner, agree with that is another matter.

There's no fucking with these big boys—they know exactly what they're doing, how to do it, appeal to a broad taste and execute their ideas on a fiercely strict budget.

Logistics aside, though, why does this appeal to people so much? "For some, it's a curiousness," he explains. "Some people don't even know it's airline food. In the UK and the US there's a different perception of airline food than in Europe and Germany. In Germany you normally don't get food because you're just flying within the country. If you do, you get a bun with some cheese—that's not really a meal. Over here, people want to have one of the great meals that are always in the press and that people in first-class get to eat. Now, they can get a part of that comfortable flying experience at home."

Sadly, Air Food One don't supply all of what most of us see as the archetypal crappy airplane dinner accoutrements to really round off your dining experience. There's no tough little bread roll, plywood-like crackers, or triangles of plasticky La Vache Qui Rit cheese, not even a rhombus of tinned-fruit salad, for God's sake. "No, we don't do the trays and the desserts and everything," says Thinius, who doesn't seem to understand how disappointing this news is.

Air Food One's menus include things like chicken, mashed potatoes, and cannelloni. It is, according to Max, moving with the health food tidal wave. "There's a new organic trend in Berlin—people want fresh food, but with convenience, too."

So, is airline food the new poster girl for healthy meals? It could be. As long as there are people who don't want to stop watching Crazy, Stupid, Love when dinner time approaches—let's face it, that could be any one of us—this new scheme could really take off.