Let’s face it, airplane food has long been the punchline of countless travel jokes. Think overcooked pasta, rubbery chicken, and sad little salads served in plastic trays. But behind the scenes, a culinary revolution is quietly underway to change how we eat at 35,000 feet, with Chef Molly Brandt Innovation Chef for North America and Chris Kinsella, Chief Commercial Officer for North America at gategroup.

“I want to have a balanced dish,” Brandt explains in the June 8, 2025 Freakonomics episode.  Her mission is clear: design airline meals that are flavorful despite altitude, pressure, and mass production.

It’s no small task. gategroup, headquartered in Switzerland, serves over 650 million passengers annually on more than 3.8 million flights. The company operates in 60 countries across six continents, providing meals to major airlines like Delta, United, and Virgin Atlantic. Through its catering arm, gategourmet, it prepares hundreds of thousands of meals each day, all on strict budgets and even stricter schedules.

The financials are staggering, United Airlines alone spends $2 billion annually on catering, or about $33 per meal for its premium customers. And yet, explains Kinsella, every penny counts.

“Lemons and limes on an aircraft, olives in a salad, we are literally counting pennies with the airline,” Kinsella says. “At our scale, even small changes yield thousands of dollars in savings.”

That scale creates immense logistical challenges. Meals are fully cooked, chilled, and then reheated on board using convection ovens. Not all ingredients survive this process. “Forget about crispy textures or delicate salads,” Brandt laughs. Instead, she leans on time-tested solutions: hearty proteins, bold sauces, and ingredients like mushrooms or shio koji, a Japanese enzyme that tenderizes and deepens umami flavor.

“When you’re dehydrated at altitude, your taste buds dull,” Brandt notes. “So we have to engineer craveability into every component. I’ll walk through frozen food aisles to study how others solve these same problems.”

Once her recipes pass the flavor test, they undergo industrial-level engineering to meet the standards of mass production, all while maintaining food safety. That’s no joke in an industry where even minor contamination could be disastrous mid-flight.

“We’re serving thousands daily. Safety is non-negotiable,” Kinsella says. In fact, airline pilots are often served different meals from one another, a precautionary measure in case of contamination.

Behind every meal is a choreography of scheduling, refrigeration, labeling, and transport. Carts filled with trays are loaded onto trucks that zip across airport tarmacs and into aircraft galleys. If a flight is delayed too long, the meals are discarded. “It’s wasteful, but it’s the only way to ensure safety,” Kinsella says.

Despite their efforts, Brandt and Kinsella know the stereotype persists: airline food as a punchline. But they see the future differently.

“Airline food is the butt of all the jokes, right?” Brandt says. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. We’re trying to move the needle.”

In first and business class, that needle is already shifting. Airlines are increasingly investing in elevated menus and branding food as a premium experience. Meanwhile, economy passengers get fewer frills, and often, just a Biscoff and a soda.

But for Brandt and Kinsella, the mission continues, one carefully engineered, globally distributed, flavor-packed meal at a time.

Listen to the podcast here…

Airplane Food

Freakonomics Podcast. #Episode 95. 

Everyone loves to complain about it, but preparing a meal that tastes good at 35,000 feet is harder than you might think. Zachary Crockett will have the fish.