1. 52 AUSTRALIANAVIATIONJANUARY-FEBRUARY2017
embrace the likes of Twitter, Instagram
and Facebook and use them to their
advantage.
“Competitors can easily check out
what each other are serving at 35,000ft
by simply entering a hashtag on apps
such as Instagram,” Loukas explained
to Australian Aviation via email.
“I know for a fact that many airlines
come to my website to sneak a peek
at what other airlines are serving, and
many do research into onboard menus
also.”
And online reviews appear to really
matter for some carriers.
Loukas, an ex-pat Australian now
living in Europe, said Dutch carrier
Transavia had a quote from his article
complimenting its inflight sandwiches
featured in the onboard menu for four
years.
Also, “Aegean Airlines recently
wrote up some comments of mine in
their inflight magazine introduction,
explaining how I thought their meals
were some of the best in Europe.”
“So yes there are certainly airlines
who take my comments quite seriously
and use them to back up their products,
or show that they have a quality inflight
product.”
While it is the airlines that accept
the bouquets and cop the brickbats,
the reality is what is presented to
passengers is almost always sourced,
cooked and packed by catering
companies working under contract.
Gate Gourmet is one of those
companies. Australian Aviation recently
visited its Australian headquarters in
Sydney for a closer look at preparing
meals to be served in the sky.
30,000mealsaday
Located alongside Alexandra Canal in
Mascot and a short drive to Kingsford
Smith Airport, Gate Gourmet services
21 different airlines including the likes
of Virgin Australia, Japan Airlines,
Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines.
Although airlines comprise the vast
majority of Gate Gourmet’s business,
the company also supplies food for
NSW TrainLink and airlines’ premium
Behindthe
scenesatGate
Gourmet’s
Sydney
cateringfacility
FAST,FRESH
ANDFLYING
AT35,000FT
Q
uick question. Can you
remember what you had for
dinner a week ago? Try this
one. What did you eat on your
most recent flight?
The meals we enjoy (or
endure depending on your point of
view) when travelling through the
sky at 35,000ft have always been a
major part of the inflight passenger
experience.
Everyone has a story to tell. Good
(a Japanese bento box lunch that was
out-of-this-world fabulous) and bad (a
mid-flight noodle dish that someone
forgot to heat up).
And the rise and rise of social
media, not to mention onboard wi-fi,
means the next gastronomic delight or
disaster is only a click away from being
shared with the world.
That keeps airlines on their toes
and helps them check out what the
competition is serving up.
As Nik Loukas, the founder of
airline food website Inflight Feed
explains, airlines have been quick to
WRITER:JORDANCHONG
GateGourmet’sfoodtrucks
featuringthebigbasilleafon
thesidecostbeween$350,000
and$650,000.GATE GOURMET
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2. JANUARY-FEBRUARY2017AUSTRALIANAVIATION 53
FAST,FRESH&FLYING
Everything is then loaded onto carts
and taken into a cool room where they
are allowed to stand for four hours.
During this “cold soak time”, staff
perform one final critical check through
the contents of the carts to ensure they
have all the components required for
the flight ahead.
von Wolfersdorf said it usually takes
about 18 hours for carts offloaded from
an arriving flight to be cleaned, packed
and ready to head out again.
And keeping that turnaround time
short helps the airlines’ bottom line,
given a cart costs between $800-$1,200
per unit.
“The faster we are, the more
efficient we are, the less money the
airline has to invest,” he said.
“If I say I can’t do it, you need to
give me more equipment, it is a huge
cost for the airline with almost no
benefit or return.”
Making and packing the food
represents just half of the process.
The rest of the action takes place after
the trucks depart the facility and head
airside, where the carts are loaded onto
the aircraft.
von Wolfersdorf said Sydney was
somewhat unique among its global
operations, given it serves so many
airline customers.
“What you see today in our
Sydney operations is one of the most
complex operations in the whole of the
gategroup network,” von Wolfersdorf
explained.
“Not because of size – we have
some massive facilities that do
multiple hundreds, even thousands of
operations a day, but generally only for
one airline. Whereas here we have so
many different one-a-day or two-a-day
customers, it is much more complex.
“Every airline will have its own
equipment, its own menu specifications
and its own particular needs. Sydney is
truly the most complex in our network
in Asia Pacific and in the top few in the
gategroup.”
Thesearchforwater
At the bar stocking section, there are
more than a dozen local and imported
brands of water, with 1.5l and 600ml
bottles stacked alongside those small
100ml cuplets most often seen in
economy.
von Wolfersdorf said water was
often one of the hardest items to
source as airlines all had their own
preferred brand, some of which were
not available in Australia and had to be
imported by ship.
passenger lounges at Sydney Airport.
The numbers are eye-watering –
some 30,000 meals are produced to
feed and water passengers on about 200
flights each day in what is a 24-hour,
seven days a week operation involving
up to 800 staff.
However, the need to supply such
large quantities of food does not mean
sacrificing quality – the 85 daily truck
deliveries have to pass a strict set of
conditions in order for the goods such
as pasta, fresh beef or Pepe Saya butter
to be accepted.
If the trucks are dirty, the food
inside is rejected. If cans of crushed
tomatoes are dented or scratched, the
entire batch is rejected. And if the
meat, fruit or vegetables arrive above
a certain temperature they are, again,
rejected.
“If it’s over five degrees see ya
later,” the general manager of Sydney
operations for Gate Gourmet Sascha
von Wolfersdorf told Australian
Aviation during a tour of the facility in
early December.
“If you get food poisoning in a
restaurant, it’s not good but you spend
the night in the bathroom and see your
doctor or go to the hospital in the worst
case. If you are at 38,000ft, you are not
going anywhere. That’s why food safety
is so important.”
And the sheer volume of food being
produced each day means nothing
sits around in storage unused for very
long. In Sydney, Gate Gourmet uses
16 pallets of fruit and vegetables in
any one 24-hour period, while its team
of chefs grill, roast or stir-fry some
7,000kg of protein, excluding seafood,
in that time. Fresh yoghurt arrives at
the loading dock twice a day.
“You saw the coriander in the
chiller, it’s flying tonight,” von
Wolfersdorf said.
“You can’t get it fresher anywhere in
the world.”
Gate Gourmet’s 90 chefs bring with
them a diverse range of skills, meaning
the company has the capability to put
together menus featuring 46 different
types of cuisines, from the traditional
Japanese fare seen on Japan Airlines to
western meals most likely to be served
on Australian or US carriers.
Once the food is cooked, it is placed
in large trays and then sent into blast
chillers to get the temperature under
five degrees Celsius within four hours.
The components are then
individually portioned out into those
familiar rectangular dishes for economy
class, while business and first class
meals are put into containers for plating
on board using instructions provided by
Gate Gourmet chefs.
And the attention to detail is
phenomenal. Breakfast omelettes are
all made by hand, while roast ducks
are skillfully carved and carefully
placed on trays. At the same time,
staff painstakingly pick garnishes and
gorgeously-constructed starters are
delicately placed into mini-tubs.
“First class canapés is food art,” von
Wolfersdorf said.
Drinkscartsbeingpreparedfor
anupcomingflight.JORDAN CHONG
Staffplacecups,platesandtraysononeoffour
dishwashingbeltsforcleaning.JORDAN CHONG
Everythingthatcomesofftheaircraftiscountedafter
washing.Thatway,anyshortageofcups,forksor
platescanbeimmediatelyreportedbacktotheairline
forreplacement.JORDAN CHONG
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3. 54 AUSTRALIANAVIATIONJANUARY-FEBRUARY2017
“I’ve got more water in here than
Mount Franklin,” von Wolfersdorf
quipped.
“If you think water loading should
be the simplest part of this business –
unfortunately it’s not.”
Australianbiosecurityrules
Regular international travellers will be
familiar with reminders from cabin
crew as flights prepare to arrive
into Australia not to take any airline
food off the aircraft for quarantine
reasons.
Well, that leftover food – even
unopened packets of biscuits – is
removed from the carts once back
at Gate Gourmet’s facility and
dumped into specially marked yellow
quarantine bins.
It is then taken offsite where it is
burned by a separate company, as
required under Australian law.
While von Wolfersdorf understood
the regulations were there for a reason,
he described the waste of what was
arguably still edible food as a great
shame.
“There are some bits and pieces
which are arriving here in pretty good
condition,” he said.
“A cookie from India, whether it
is quarantine or not, if you eat it or if
you give it to somebody on the street it
wouldn’t kill anyone, it wouldn’t affect
the Australian environment. Let’s be
serious about it.
“But rules are rules.”
The water used to clean the 3.2
million trays, plates and cutlery
cleaned each year by enormous
dishwashers that basically never stop
running unless being serviced is also
subject to biosecurity regulations.
“Quarantine is not just the actual
waste of the food, it is also the
dishwashing water,” von Wolfersdorf
explained.
“This is also classified as
quarantine waste so it goes in a
completely different system, not where
the regular water would go.”
However, on a more positive note,
von Wolfersdorf has struck up a
partnership with OzHarvest to collect
food that is not sold or consumed
on board domestic flights and is
still fresh.
The charity comes by twice a day
to pick up banana bread, muffins and
other pre-packaged items to distribute
to homeless people, schools and other
groups.
The partnership delivered 16 tonnes
of food in November.
Australianoperationsgrowing
Gate Gourmet has a catering presence
at airports across Australia and New
Zealand including full hot kitchens
in Darwin, Cairns, Sydney and
Auckland.
The Sydney and Cairns flight
kitchens were bought from Qantas’s
catering arm Q Catering in 2012.
Recently, the company has opened
a new catering facility at Brisbane
and Melbourne airports featuring
cold kitchens, dishwashing and
cartwashing, food portioning, bonded
stores, assembly and equipment
packing. Both sites will also have full
hot kitchens installed in 2017.
von Wolfersdorf said Gate
Gourmet’s growth in this country
reflected the rise in international
carriers flying to Australia.
Moreover, its expansion has
also coincided with long-time Gate
Gourmet customer Virgin’s move
from being a budget carrier in the
Virgin Blue days to a full-service
carrier rebranded as Virgin Australia.
“We went from being that low-cost
carrier provider in most of those
operating centres to a full-service
provider,” von Wolfersdorf said.
“With the rebranding we then had
to go from ‘man-in-a-van’ to proper
in-flight catering delivery in trucks.”
von Wolfersdorf is upbeat about
the prospects for the catering
company in the period ahead amid
the growth in inbound tourists and the
recent open skies agreement reached
between the Australian and Chinese
governments, which has removed
capacity caps for airlines of both
nations.
“We are already seeing an increase
in Chinese carriers and on Chinese
routes,” he said.
“From our business perspective we
see that there’s going to be growth in
those international customers.
“We are increasing our capability
in order to meet those demands.”
However, Gate Gourmet, like the
aviation sector in general, is always
susceptible to external shocks.
“When you have global events like
a SARS or a bird flu or something
like that and the airlines feel the heat
then the catering is an easy place to
pick off,” von Wolfersdorf said.
“If there is seven or eight items
on the tray, you could probably take
two or three of those off if that is your
decision to remove that cost.
“Our margins are not high. The
industry margins are not high.”
Airlines’waterpreferencesare
oneofthemostdifficultparts
oftheGateGourmetbusiness.
JORDAN CHONG
I’vegotmorewater
inherethanMount
Franklin.
SASCHAVON WOLFERSDORF
Airlinesarekeentosource
localingredientsfrom
asclosetotheairportas
possibleformaximum
freshness.JORDAN CHONG
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4. JANUARY-FEBRUARY2017AUSTRALIANAVIATION 55
FAST,FRESH&FLYING
Retailbecomingapotentialnightmare
One of the increasing trends in airline
food is giving passengers the ability
to pre-order their meal before the
flight, from selecting a sandwich when
purchasing a Tigerair Australia ticket
from Melbourne to Hobart or picking
the famous lobster thermidor with
Singapore Airlines’ “Book the Cook”
option available to business and first
class passengers.
While this gives consumers more
choice, von Wolfersdorf said it
represented an extra challenge for his
staff.
“Tiger and Jetstar are pretty big at
the moment with pre-ordering, which
is really a nightmare for us because you
can book your flight now and order a
sandwich wrap which I then have to
deliver on the aircraft on your flight,”
he explained.
“Which basically means I never
have a real forecast because I don’t
know who is going to fly, who is going
to pre-book anything.
“And if you even load it on the
aircraft and there is an aircraft change
for whatever reason your snack might
be on the wrong aircraft.
“Buy-on-board is going to get bigger
and bigger in the domestic market but
really it is a challenge.”
Notjustacateringcompany
Almost everything needed for a flight
has to be packed on a cart, from the
pajamas and amenity kits handed out
to those at the pointy end of the aircraft
to the gloves needed by cabin crew
to handle the onboard ovens. Gate
Gourmet even packs the newspapers and
fresh cut flowers.
It makes the company just as much a
logistics and supply chain business as a
catering operation.
Moreover, the gategroup companies
feature 11 separate operating businesses
covering anything from building
onboard catering equipment, designing
software solutions for inflight sales and
conducting aircraft cleaning. There are
also companies that specialise in putting
together amenity kits and designing
aircraft glassware and cutlery.
“We’ve really morphed from being
an inflight catering company to now
having packaging, design and retail,”
von Wolfersdorf said.
GategrouptobecomepartofHNAGroup
In April, HNA Group announced
a US$1.5 billion takeover offer for
Switzerland-headquartered gategroup,
adding the world’s second-largest
catering company to a rapidly expanding
portfolio of aviation-related assets
that also includes a shareholding (and
board seat) of Virgin Australia, Hainan
Airlines, aircraft leasing company
Avalon Holdings and airport luggage
handler Swissport.
The transaction was expected to
close at the end of 2016.
von Wolfersdorf said it was still too
early to notice any impact of the deal.
“But obviously they are looking at
our business, how we do things, who
we work with, which airlines,” he said.
While there would be some
benefits to being part of such a large
conglomerate that includes a stable
of carriers in China, Australia and
elsewhere, the general manager said
Gate Gourmet would still have to win
tenders on merit.
“Becoming part of something so
big, there would be some aligned
strategies but I don’t see that giving
us a competitive advantage in an open
tender,” he said.
“I already know from experience
there are no favours. We won’t win
the contract if we don’t give the best
service at the best price.
“There is much to be said for
keeping things within the same
group but it is a very competitive
environment.”
AtGateGourmet’sAsianfoodstation,achef
preparesaredchickencurry.JORDAN CHONG
Achefhasthreefrypansonthe
gomakingbreakfastomelettes.
JORDAN CHONG
Gate Gourmet.indd 55 16/12/2016 1:36 am