Catering for a
Unfurling a chart of company brand values across her desk, Virgin Atlantic's general manager of in-flight services Judith Wilcox points out the positive adjectives printed on the chart inside vibrantly-coloured squares.
"Confident" stares out from purple, "professional" is secure inside yellow, "fun" is orange and, most importantly, green indicates "flair".
It is flair that defines what Wilcox calls a "Virgin person". It means possessing the qualities on the chart, knowing your mind and exuding corporate charisma.
Colour is central to creating Virgin flair: staff wear cherry-red uniforms, while travellers' amenity kits come with purple socks and green eye patches.
When the time came to review the airline's economy service, colour enhancement was top of the bill. And the obvious place to start was with in-flight meals.
Passenger focus groups showed that economy travellers wanted warm bread rolls, real glasses for their wine, larger cups for their hot drinks and larger napkins and cutlery. Significantly, although there were no strong complaints about the quality of food, passengers wanted to feel assured that their meals were really fresh and not reminiscent of the stereotypical plastic-wrapped, plastic-tasting airline food.
As Wilcox explains, the results caused Virgin's creative think-tank to consider the issues of presentation and aesthetics. "We decided to play around with space and design. We unashamedly looked at the likes of Pràt à Manger sandwiches and supermarket meals. We used those as a basis to overcome the perception of poor quality airline food," she says.
She stresses that most airline food is fresher than its supermarket counterparts simply because the process of cooking, chilling, reheating and consumption takes place within a much shorter time span. Passengers typically eat the airline meal one day after it has been cooked.
Early on, Virgin decided to banish what Wilcox describes as "the grey tray look". Taking its cue from supermarket shelves, the company studied how vibrant packaging and a lively use of labelling can be used to sell every sort of dish.
But logistics mean the airline is unable to provide the wide range of choices available in a supermarket. And so it follows a specific formula, depending on the route, the time of day of the flight and its length (see panel).
Wilcox explains: "We have three choices of entrée. One will always be a contemporary British meal, another will be a Mediterranean-based dish and the third will have an ethnic twist to it. Ethnic and Mediterranean food are now mainstream with the public and that gives us a lot more opportunity to experiment. That again reflects the high street and that's why we use this as our frame of reference. There's no magic to it."
One of the opportunities offered by ethnic foods is their stronger, spicier tastes. This is especially welcome in the airborne environment where taste buds are blunted by up to 40% because of dehydration.
The new meal service, which cabin crew wheeled down the aisles for the first time last summer, has, according to Wilcox, received rave reviews.
Boasting tamper-proof seals for guaranteed freshness, nutritional information with details such as fat and calorie content and larger, brighter trays with improved cutlery, cups and napkins, it seems the company has striven to meet the focus groups' demands.
"I use the acid test that I'd never put on anything that the cabin crew would be embarrassed to serve. And the passengers love it. Flights have been packed right into autumn, although I can't claim that this is solely because of the food. They might have been busy anyway," says Wilcox.
