Emirates Flight Catering: The kitchen that cooks 38m meals a year
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farhanalee7
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And Emirates first plane was provided by PIA on lease... And nw Emirates have largest fleet of A380-800... 
Al Bhatti
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PIA runs two modern, well-equipped Flight Kitchens in Karachi and Islamabad that serve culinary delights ranging from delicious Pakistani delicacies to tempting Western cuisines to more than 15,000 passengers everyday, traveling on domestic and international flights. In addition to serving sumptuous food, PIA Flight Kitchens also cater to VVIP flights and Chartered flights for top government officials and foreign delegates. Special meals which are customized according to the passengers’ requirements like Diabetic Meal, Vegetarian Meal, Low Cholesterol Meal and Baby Meals are also offered to our passengers upon request.
PIA - About PIA
---------------
PIA kitchens in Karachi and Islamabad together serves 15000 passengers everyday on domestic and international flights. 15,000 x 365 = 5,475,000 meals (5.475 million)
Emirates serves 38,000,000 (38 million) meals a year. 6,600 workers, 125,000 dinners: All in a day's work for Emirates Flight Catering
On wet lease, meaning plane + crew
PIA - About PIA
---------------
PIA kitchens in Karachi and Islamabad together serves 15000 passengers everyday on domestic and international flights. 15,000 x 365 = 5,475,000 meals (5.475 million)
Emirates serves 38,000,000 (38 million) meals a year. 6,600 workers, 125,000 dinners: All in a day's work for Emirates Flight Catering
And Emirates first plane was provided by PIA on lease... And nw Emirates have largest fleet of A380-800...
On wet lease, meaning plane + crew
Last edited:
Al Bhatti
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- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
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- 5,686
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- 6
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April 12, 2014
State of the art technology at work
Embracing technological advances keeps Emirates ahead of the pack
Over the years, Emirates Flight Catering, with the help of German industrial design company i + o, has introduced progressive systems and high-tech machinery, driving toward greater efficiency.
It is a conscious decision, according to James A. Griffith, assistant vice president. He said: “We’re continuously ahead of the market, with a facility that is one of the most modern in the world.”
The building itself is equipped with a building management system (BMS), which controls all electromechanical and automated processes.
Lee Farrelly, assistant vice president of operations, said: “Our flight catering building is 55,000 square kilometres, with an inbound and outbound dock for transport vehicles incorporated into it like a tunnel. Everything is built upwards, to save space and accommodate the smallest possible carbon footprint.”
Specially designed trucks, called highloaders, bring in linen and food trays from flights through one of the 34 loading bays — and take back carts for departing flights. The highloaders are custom-made for A380 and A777 planes and are able to move eight metres high.
Moving indoors, in the cold kitchen where appetisers are made, and the bakery area, the inclusion of new technology has helped speed up the cooking process.
Automated blending machines quicken the creation of cupcakes and cheesecakes. Large deck ovens are in place for crème caramels, and rack ovens for yeast-based items.
A water jet cutter shoots out a razor-sharp stream of water with clinical precision, ensuring every slice of dessert is uniform.
In the hot kitchen, or the cooking area, completed dishes are put through the blast chiller at the very end of the cooking cycle as a safety measure. The machine brings down the temperature of food to 10 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes, preventing bacterial growth.
Another operation the building comprises, is the state-of-the-art warewash facility, which opened in August 2013.
The largest in the world, this mammoth enterprise has 26 washing lines, with the capacity to clean an average of “2.5 million pieces” of equipment a day.
All incoming cutlery, trays, trolleys that come through here are separated and washed in a series of specially designed machines.
An electric monorail conveyor system covers 2.55 kilometres and helps move over 7,500 meal carts and 13,000 containers a day.
Carts, meal trays, oven racks and standard units are transported on motorised carriers.
The facility also has a series of 600 metre-long vacuum waste pipes, which take garbage to a central waste collection point, where a dedicated environmental team recovers recyclable material.
The machinery and equipment is closely and constantly monitored for any sign of irregularity.
Farrelly said: “All machines are interlinked and managed at the control room. Engineers are always available and in case of a breakdown, they know immediately exactly where to go.”
State of the art technology at work | GulfNews.com
-----------------------------------------------
April 12, 2014
Planning the menu takes over 8 months
Meticulous attention to detail and fresh produce go into creating in-flight meals
Peel back the aluminium foil, and unwrap your plastic knife and fork. What’s on the mid-air menu?
In a typical Emirates airline flight, the meal that is set before passengers is decided a year earlier, picked from a range of 80,000 recipes, made with ingredients from farms in Al Ain or as far away as Australia, and prepared by skilled chefs – many of whom have Michelin star experience.
James A. Griffith, assistant vice president at Emirates Flight Catering, said the Emirates philosophy for in-flight meals is “to do it restaurant-style, trying to stay as traditional as possible to make the food taste great”.
However, that means serving 125,000 restaurant-style meals a day, reaching 150,000 in summer months when airport traffic is at its peak.
It entails meticulous planning, so that quality ingredients can be sourced and recipes created.
The process begins 8 to 12 months prior, when the Emirates Flight Catering team proposes all food plans for the coming year to the Emirates regional catering management.
Once approved, the recipes are stored in a database.
The company’s executive chefs, who hail from as many as 45 different countries, are responsible for planning breakfast, lunch and dinner across First, Business and Economy classes, in their region’s routes.
Griffith said: “When deciding meals, we first see the timing of each flight, the distance to destination and the diversity of passengers on the flight. Middle Eastern choices are always present across all routes, as we are based in Dubai.”
About 60 per cent of the meal orders received are for non-vegetarian dishes, although Griffith says there has been a dramatic increase recently in vegetarian and gluten-free meal requests, thanks to evolving tastes and trends.
In the kitchen, the trays have to be ready to go eight hours prior to departure time so that they can complete the requisite security and quality checks.
Griffith said: “Our first order for produce is about four days before the flight. We begin preparations 24 hours before take-off, and meals are dished 12 hours before.”
However, planning is not an easy task.
Flights to every region have three choices of dessert, for instance. Some passengers also request special meals, meeting certain medical or religious requirements.
Added to this is the fact that the life span of a food tray is 24 hours – it can’t miss the flight.
Knowing the flight’s destination is a key factor in menu planning. For one-way flights, a variety of meals work, but the tricky part is to cater to long-distance and return journeys.
Griffith said: “For distant destinations, we have to provide meals that last longer… because the flight might be on the ground and have its engines shut off for a while. In such cases, it would be something like pastrami sandwiches and cold cuts.”
Certain types of food don’t take well to reheating – the chefs have to ensure their meals retain the original taste when in the air.
Griffith said: “For heating purposes, it is always great to have dishes with sauces. We usually get great feedback on our meso-based cod dish. Our steaks are cooked at 62 degrees Celsius on ground (medium-rare), so it can be a bit touchy when it’s time to reheat. US select grade beef works better on flights, so that’s what we now use.”
Taste tests and quality checks are conducted for all meals throughout the day.
Another important aspect is the ability to creatively recycle excess food. Waste is kept at a minimal, so that the processes are environmentally friendly.
Griffith shared an example: “The edges of a tray of baklava, originally prepared for a Middle Eastern route, are used to make baklava crème – a type of cheesecake - for a European flight.”
The Emirates procurement facility sources its ingredients both locally and internationally.
Griffith said: “Ten years ago, we used to buy seafood locally, like hammour. But because of overfishing in this region, and our drive to promote sustainable fishing, we began buying fish from Vietnam. Our lamb is from Australia, and our lobster and black cod from Canada.”
One reason for the move to global shores is the fact that passengers have become more discerning diners and want healthier, quality produce.
R. Madhu Kumar, an executive sous chef who has worked for 24 years in flight catering, said: “People have become more health-conscious, so our menus have changed over the past five or six years to reflect that.”
Griffith added: “With the opening of lounges, people are coming to the airport earlier, eating before boarding and preferring to sleep on flights. They would rather have soups and salads – smaller meals that are available more frequently. It’s a changing process.”
Planning the menu takes over 8 months | GulfNews.com
----------------------------
April 12, 2014
Emirates Flight Catering: Feeding hungry fliers by the millions
Here’s a detailed look at how Emirates Flight Catering manages to get it right
Everybody needs to eat. It doesn’t matter where you are. Being 35,000 feet high in the sky is not going to stop your stomach from rumbling. And feeding that demanding beast is what Emirates Flight Catering does – on a 24-hour cycle.
The numbers are massive; 125,000 meals a day. That’s three meals a day for a population of over 80 villages.
No matter how you look at it, the numbers are awe inspiring – big enough to be a global first. Imagine your daily dinner and multiply that by 40,000 or so. Emirates Flight Catering is feeding a lot of hungry fliers daily.
Their closest competitor from the Far East serves up about 70,000 meals a day during peak traffic. Emirates delivers 150,000 meals a day during summer. And there are further expansion plans.
We decided to visit the catering facility located near Dubai International Airport and get our head around this super structure in food production, the world’s largest of its kind in terms of volume throughput.
When you think of the numbers, space is what comes to mind, along with sprawling acres of gleaming surfaces. But, we were in for a surprise. Gleaming and modern yes, but the space was optimized to create a vertical multi-storey system that follows a one-way process flow. To put it simply, it works like an inverted horseshoe. The building is a clever expression of modernist architecture, wherein ‘industrial form follows function’.
So we begin with Emirates aircraft galleys being emptied, and brought to the facility by high-loader vehicles – all within 30 minutes of an aircraft’s arrival. Time is efficiency, so there isn’t a second to be lost.
There are 34 special loading bays at the Emirates catering facility and 18 of them are in use at any point of time. The vehicles offload everything, including the laundry that gets sent off to the facility in Jebel Ali.
Lee Farrelly, Assistant Vice President Operations, said: “The operations are made up of five departments… it has 3,500 staff members working 24 by 7.”
The meal carts are loaded on to an automated monorail transport system. And off it goes to a designated area, where they are manually stripped.
The trays, cutlery, flatware, waste, all of it is collected and moved into allotted segments. Everything goes off to the ware wash area, which employs 615 people. Giant dish washers sluice away. They clean and sanitize 2.5 million items including cutlery, crockery and glassware in a day. And every piece is logged in because an active housekeeping process is a necessary part of the inventory.
As the facility optimizes space, there isn’t too much space to store back-up items – the high bay store has just enough to cover 12 hours. The rest is nestled way in Jebel Ali, with regular refilling as necessary.
After washing, everything goes off into a specialized storage system. Upon request, the system will transport the required number of items to the food preparation and meal pre-setting areas.
Now starts the real fun. There are three aspects to in-flight catering at an extremely basic level. One is planning a meal, the other is daily preparation and the third is putting it on to a meal tray to reach the consumer.
The first is a long-term process that involves studying flight routes, regions, passenger traffic, food preferences, produce availability and cultural requirements, weight, along with taste and presentation.
Chef James A. Griffith, assistant vice president at Emirates Flight Catering said: “We work at least a year in advance. It is restaurant style food. Emirates is known for the cuisine.”
They work hard to ensure that each dish is free of additives, preservatives and maintains it quality, along with having longevity.
“We have an in-house laboratory with a team of 27 people that keeps a close watch on quality and food safety,” he said.
An interesting element is that no matter how the chefs experiment, they have to make sure the menu fits the existing flatware. It is not logical to have to shop for truckloads of crockery every time the menu changes, which is at least thrice a year. So, it takes months of detailed planning, testing and evaluation before it finally makes its way on to an inflight menu.
Once that is done, the food takes form in the kitchen. Now we’ll simplify it even further and look at a single meal tray. Forget about options such as lunch, breakfast dinner, snack or the hundreds of routes.
Every meal preparation starts eight hours prior to the departure of the flight.
A sample tray would have a salad, bread roll, butter, a main course and dessert, along with flatware, sachets of seasoning, water and crockery. This means the coming together of the cold kitchen, bakery/pastry kitchen, the hot kitchen and tray setting area. And, you do have to keep in mind that they are not making just one meal at a time.
The cold foods section starts creating an assembly line of salad bowls. It dishes out an average of 34,000 fruit salads every day, explains R. Madhu Kumar, the chef in charge. He’s been in the business for 24 years.
“We make 20,000 sandwiches in a day and about 77,000 starters,” he said.
However, with quality being imperative, prior to the start of each set up, a special gold standard is created and placed. So, every chef working on that preparation knows how each presentation is supposed to look. It helps optimize and standardize presentation.
Meanwhile, each of the other section gets into the flow, too. Hundreds of perfectly shaped meringues are being browned in industrial sized ovens and giant plates of kunafeh get sliced with precision.
Batter is mixed in gallon quantities. Armies of muffins are loaded. 30,000 bread rolls spritzed to golden perfection. It employs 100 chefs.
The hot kitchen is busy, too. Perhaps the main course on the route is chicken tikka masala with pulao, along with a meat and vegetarian option. The food is stirred, tossed, spices pounded, rice fluffed and everything sent off to be dished on to trays. The kitchen is sectioned off to cover Far Eastern, Arabic/Middle East, Continental, Japanese, Sub-Continent and special meals. Following that the food is exposed to a blast chiller for 45 minutes as a safety measure.
Mukesh Tugnait, executive chef, said: “The logistics of the kitchens are equivalent to cooking for 500 weddings… 35,000 tonnes of food is prepared. We use 2,500 menus and 80,000 recipes in a year.”
Almost simultaneously, the food trays are being set up as per the flight and meal requirements. According to Dean Brooks, the Flight Preparation Manager, “80% of those employed to do this are women because they’re precise … more attention to detail.”
As the dishes are prepared, hygiene, taste and quality testing is carried out. This happens at every stage of the preparation, to ensure that only the optimal results reach consumers. Special attention is placed on the temperatures of the areas that the items are prepared, including airflow and storage. Nothing is left to chance, including the cleaning. A team of 420 ensures that the facility is pristine at all times.
Finally, the tray is done. They get loaded into a meal cart. The carts can take 34 trays, depending on the aircraft and passenger volume. They are then carted off to a storage room with sub-zero temperatures and left there for a fixed duration, prior to being loaded onto carriers that will take it to the aircraft. This further ensures food safety and quality control.
And the cycle starts all over again.
Emirates Flight Catering: Feeding hungry fliers by the millions | GulfNews.com
State of the art technology at work
Embracing technological advances keeps Emirates ahead of the pack
Over the years, Emirates Flight Catering, with the help of German industrial design company i + o, has introduced progressive systems and high-tech machinery, driving toward greater efficiency.
It is a conscious decision, according to James A. Griffith, assistant vice president. He said: “We’re continuously ahead of the market, with a facility that is one of the most modern in the world.”
The building itself is equipped with a building management system (BMS), which controls all electromechanical and automated processes.
Lee Farrelly, assistant vice president of operations, said: “Our flight catering building is 55,000 square kilometres, with an inbound and outbound dock for transport vehicles incorporated into it like a tunnel. Everything is built upwards, to save space and accommodate the smallest possible carbon footprint.”
Specially designed trucks, called highloaders, bring in linen and food trays from flights through one of the 34 loading bays — and take back carts for departing flights. The highloaders are custom-made for A380 and A777 planes and are able to move eight metres high.
Moving indoors, in the cold kitchen where appetisers are made, and the bakery area, the inclusion of new technology has helped speed up the cooking process.
Automated blending machines quicken the creation of cupcakes and cheesecakes. Large deck ovens are in place for crème caramels, and rack ovens for yeast-based items.
A water jet cutter shoots out a razor-sharp stream of water with clinical precision, ensuring every slice of dessert is uniform.
In the hot kitchen, or the cooking area, completed dishes are put through the blast chiller at the very end of the cooking cycle as a safety measure. The machine brings down the temperature of food to 10 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes, preventing bacterial growth.
Another operation the building comprises, is the state-of-the-art warewash facility, which opened in August 2013.
The largest in the world, this mammoth enterprise has 26 washing lines, with the capacity to clean an average of “2.5 million pieces” of equipment a day.
All incoming cutlery, trays, trolleys that come through here are separated and washed in a series of specially designed machines.
An electric monorail conveyor system covers 2.55 kilometres and helps move over 7,500 meal carts and 13,000 containers a day.
Carts, meal trays, oven racks and standard units are transported on motorised carriers.
The facility also has a series of 600 metre-long vacuum waste pipes, which take garbage to a central waste collection point, where a dedicated environmental team recovers recyclable material.
The machinery and equipment is closely and constantly monitored for any sign of irregularity.
Farrelly said: “All machines are interlinked and managed at the control room. Engineers are always available and in case of a breakdown, they know immediately exactly where to go.”
State of the art technology at work | GulfNews.com
-----------------------------------------------
April 12, 2014
Planning the menu takes over 8 months
Meticulous attention to detail and fresh produce go into creating in-flight meals
Peel back the aluminium foil, and unwrap your plastic knife and fork. What’s on the mid-air menu?
In a typical Emirates airline flight, the meal that is set before passengers is decided a year earlier, picked from a range of 80,000 recipes, made with ingredients from farms in Al Ain or as far away as Australia, and prepared by skilled chefs – many of whom have Michelin star experience.
James A. Griffith, assistant vice president at Emirates Flight Catering, said the Emirates philosophy for in-flight meals is “to do it restaurant-style, trying to stay as traditional as possible to make the food taste great”.
However, that means serving 125,000 restaurant-style meals a day, reaching 150,000 in summer months when airport traffic is at its peak.
It entails meticulous planning, so that quality ingredients can be sourced and recipes created.
The process begins 8 to 12 months prior, when the Emirates Flight Catering team proposes all food plans for the coming year to the Emirates regional catering management.
Once approved, the recipes are stored in a database.
The company’s executive chefs, who hail from as many as 45 different countries, are responsible for planning breakfast, lunch and dinner across First, Business and Economy classes, in their region’s routes.
Griffith said: “When deciding meals, we first see the timing of each flight, the distance to destination and the diversity of passengers on the flight. Middle Eastern choices are always present across all routes, as we are based in Dubai.”
About 60 per cent of the meal orders received are for non-vegetarian dishes, although Griffith says there has been a dramatic increase recently in vegetarian and gluten-free meal requests, thanks to evolving tastes and trends.
In the kitchen, the trays have to be ready to go eight hours prior to departure time so that they can complete the requisite security and quality checks.
Griffith said: “Our first order for produce is about four days before the flight. We begin preparations 24 hours before take-off, and meals are dished 12 hours before.”
However, planning is not an easy task.
Flights to every region have three choices of dessert, for instance. Some passengers also request special meals, meeting certain medical or religious requirements.
Added to this is the fact that the life span of a food tray is 24 hours – it can’t miss the flight.
Knowing the flight’s destination is a key factor in menu planning. For one-way flights, a variety of meals work, but the tricky part is to cater to long-distance and return journeys.
Griffith said: “For distant destinations, we have to provide meals that last longer… because the flight might be on the ground and have its engines shut off for a while. In such cases, it would be something like pastrami sandwiches and cold cuts.”
Certain types of food don’t take well to reheating – the chefs have to ensure their meals retain the original taste when in the air.
Griffith said: “For heating purposes, it is always great to have dishes with sauces. We usually get great feedback on our meso-based cod dish. Our steaks are cooked at 62 degrees Celsius on ground (medium-rare), so it can be a bit touchy when it’s time to reheat. US select grade beef works better on flights, so that’s what we now use.”
Taste tests and quality checks are conducted for all meals throughout the day.
Another important aspect is the ability to creatively recycle excess food. Waste is kept at a minimal, so that the processes are environmentally friendly.
Griffith shared an example: “The edges of a tray of baklava, originally prepared for a Middle Eastern route, are used to make baklava crème – a type of cheesecake - for a European flight.”
The Emirates procurement facility sources its ingredients both locally and internationally.
Griffith said: “Ten years ago, we used to buy seafood locally, like hammour. But because of overfishing in this region, and our drive to promote sustainable fishing, we began buying fish from Vietnam. Our lamb is from Australia, and our lobster and black cod from Canada.”
One reason for the move to global shores is the fact that passengers have become more discerning diners and want healthier, quality produce.
R. Madhu Kumar, an executive sous chef who has worked for 24 years in flight catering, said: “People have become more health-conscious, so our menus have changed over the past five or six years to reflect that.”
Griffith added: “With the opening of lounges, people are coming to the airport earlier, eating before boarding and preferring to sleep on flights. They would rather have soups and salads – smaller meals that are available more frequently. It’s a changing process.”
Planning the menu takes over 8 months | GulfNews.com
----------------------------
April 12, 2014
Emirates Flight Catering: Feeding hungry fliers by the millions
Here’s a detailed look at how Emirates Flight Catering manages to get it right
Everybody needs to eat. It doesn’t matter where you are. Being 35,000 feet high in the sky is not going to stop your stomach from rumbling. And feeding that demanding beast is what Emirates Flight Catering does – on a 24-hour cycle.
The numbers are massive; 125,000 meals a day. That’s three meals a day for a population of over 80 villages.
No matter how you look at it, the numbers are awe inspiring – big enough to be a global first. Imagine your daily dinner and multiply that by 40,000 or so. Emirates Flight Catering is feeding a lot of hungry fliers daily.
Their closest competitor from the Far East serves up about 70,000 meals a day during peak traffic. Emirates delivers 150,000 meals a day during summer. And there are further expansion plans.
We decided to visit the catering facility located near Dubai International Airport and get our head around this super structure in food production, the world’s largest of its kind in terms of volume throughput.
When you think of the numbers, space is what comes to mind, along with sprawling acres of gleaming surfaces. But, we were in for a surprise. Gleaming and modern yes, but the space was optimized to create a vertical multi-storey system that follows a one-way process flow. To put it simply, it works like an inverted horseshoe. The building is a clever expression of modernist architecture, wherein ‘industrial form follows function’.
So we begin with Emirates aircraft galleys being emptied, and brought to the facility by high-loader vehicles – all within 30 minutes of an aircraft’s arrival. Time is efficiency, so there isn’t a second to be lost.
There are 34 special loading bays at the Emirates catering facility and 18 of them are in use at any point of time. The vehicles offload everything, including the laundry that gets sent off to the facility in Jebel Ali.
Lee Farrelly, Assistant Vice President Operations, said: “The operations are made up of five departments… it has 3,500 staff members working 24 by 7.”
The meal carts are loaded on to an automated monorail transport system. And off it goes to a designated area, where they are manually stripped.
The trays, cutlery, flatware, waste, all of it is collected and moved into allotted segments. Everything goes off to the ware wash area, which employs 615 people. Giant dish washers sluice away. They clean and sanitize 2.5 million items including cutlery, crockery and glassware in a day. And every piece is logged in because an active housekeeping process is a necessary part of the inventory.
As the facility optimizes space, there isn’t too much space to store back-up items – the high bay store has just enough to cover 12 hours. The rest is nestled way in Jebel Ali, with regular refilling as necessary.
After washing, everything goes off into a specialized storage system. Upon request, the system will transport the required number of items to the food preparation and meal pre-setting areas.
Now starts the real fun. There are three aspects to in-flight catering at an extremely basic level. One is planning a meal, the other is daily preparation and the third is putting it on to a meal tray to reach the consumer.
The first is a long-term process that involves studying flight routes, regions, passenger traffic, food preferences, produce availability and cultural requirements, weight, along with taste and presentation.
Chef James A. Griffith, assistant vice president at Emirates Flight Catering said: “We work at least a year in advance. It is restaurant style food. Emirates is known for the cuisine.”
They work hard to ensure that each dish is free of additives, preservatives and maintains it quality, along with having longevity.
“We have an in-house laboratory with a team of 27 people that keeps a close watch on quality and food safety,” he said.
An interesting element is that no matter how the chefs experiment, they have to make sure the menu fits the existing flatware. It is not logical to have to shop for truckloads of crockery every time the menu changes, which is at least thrice a year. So, it takes months of detailed planning, testing and evaluation before it finally makes its way on to an inflight menu.
Once that is done, the food takes form in the kitchen. Now we’ll simplify it even further and look at a single meal tray. Forget about options such as lunch, breakfast dinner, snack or the hundreds of routes.
Every meal preparation starts eight hours prior to the departure of the flight.
A sample tray would have a salad, bread roll, butter, a main course and dessert, along with flatware, sachets of seasoning, water and crockery. This means the coming together of the cold kitchen, bakery/pastry kitchen, the hot kitchen and tray setting area. And, you do have to keep in mind that they are not making just one meal at a time.
The cold foods section starts creating an assembly line of salad bowls. It dishes out an average of 34,000 fruit salads every day, explains R. Madhu Kumar, the chef in charge. He’s been in the business for 24 years.
“We make 20,000 sandwiches in a day and about 77,000 starters,” he said.
However, with quality being imperative, prior to the start of each set up, a special gold standard is created and placed. So, every chef working on that preparation knows how each presentation is supposed to look. It helps optimize and standardize presentation.
Meanwhile, each of the other section gets into the flow, too. Hundreds of perfectly shaped meringues are being browned in industrial sized ovens and giant plates of kunafeh get sliced with precision.
Batter is mixed in gallon quantities. Armies of muffins are loaded. 30,000 bread rolls spritzed to golden perfection. It employs 100 chefs.
The hot kitchen is busy, too. Perhaps the main course on the route is chicken tikka masala with pulao, along with a meat and vegetarian option. The food is stirred, tossed, spices pounded, rice fluffed and everything sent off to be dished on to trays. The kitchen is sectioned off to cover Far Eastern, Arabic/Middle East, Continental, Japanese, Sub-Continent and special meals. Following that the food is exposed to a blast chiller for 45 minutes as a safety measure.
Mukesh Tugnait, executive chef, said: “The logistics of the kitchens are equivalent to cooking for 500 weddings… 35,000 tonnes of food is prepared. We use 2,500 menus and 80,000 recipes in a year.”
Almost simultaneously, the food trays are being set up as per the flight and meal requirements. According to Dean Brooks, the Flight Preparation Manager, “80% of those employed to do this are women because they’re precise … more attention to detail.”
As the dishes are prepared, hygiene, taste and quality testing is carried out. This happens at every stage of the preparation, to ensure that only the optimal results reach consumers. Special attention is placed on the temperatures of the areas that the items are prepared, including airflow and storage. Nothing is left to chance, including the cleaning. A team of 420 ensures that the facility is pristine at all times.
Finally, the tray is done. They get loaded into a meal cart. The carts can take 34 trays, depending on the aircraft and passenger volume. They are then carted off to a storage room with sub-zero temperatures and left there for a fixed duration, prior to being loaded onto carriers that will take it to the aircraft. This further ensures food safety and quality control.
And the cycle starts all over again.
Emirates Flight Catering: Feeding hungry fliers by the millions | GulfNews.com
Last edited:
