Inflight food, taste buds react differently at higher altitudes

Taste buds react differently at higher altitudes, so when designing an in-flight menu, careful consideration must be paid to each and every ingredient that goes into a dish, along with the understanding that standard kitchen equipment like gas stoves and broilers have no place on an airplane.

Singapore Airlines puts experience first. Any chef hired by the carrier must have achieved the rank of executive sous chef or higher, possessing 10 years of experience on the ground before they are educated in the ways of air-food preparation. The chefs are then schooled in both in-flight catering and quality mass production before working with the airline’s impressive roster of International Culinary Panel chefs to develop dishes to be enjoyed during a flight. These chefs aren’t the ones preparing the meals on a day-to-day basis, however – that job falls to the airline caterers.

Chefs train in a special simulator that mimics the conditions in the air.

LSG Sky Chefs is the biggest airline catering company in the world, serving 213 airports with a staff of over 2,000 global culinary professionals. With so many employees, education becomes the cornerstone for the company’s success. Joerg Tuettelmann, vice-president of culinary excellence, helms the Global Culinary Leadership Team that oversees and implements all training at the company. He explains that training is based on three levels: “Enhancing our own expertise by learning from external expert organizations, sharing know-how and best practices around developed standards, applying those practices on the job and localizing them to meet the different requirements at each location.” That means that some chefs may train in a specialized simulator that mimics the conditions in the air while other chefs in various regions receive elite certifications and additional training from groups like the American Culinary Federation and the Culinary Institute of America.

To further emphasize the training process, LSG Sky Chefs recently introduced their new Culinary Excellence Strategy, which will keep the company at the forefront of the airline catering industry for years to come – even when they eventually expand their altitudinal reach to Mars.