Cooking with altitude

British Airways firmly believes that it can win customers from competitors by serving better food, and it's employing some of the country's top chefs to help. Gaby Huddart reports.

No doubt about it, the airline industry has not been having a good time recently. Since the 11 September terrorist attacks in the USA, passenger numbers have plummeted and the headlines have been full of tales of airlines in financial difficulties.

As a result, the food served in-flight to passengers is of more importance than ever before, according to David Stockton, head of global food and beverage at British Airways. With competition between airlines now fiercer than for many years, winning a reputation for dishing up the best meals in the sky could be a significant boost to business, he argues. "What matters now is getting bums on seats," he says, "and if we're seen to add value by offering the best food, then that's good news for us."

Stockton's belief that food has the ability to enhance BA's bottom line did not have its beginnings in the autumn, however. In the two years since he was appointed to his current role, he has made it his mission to give BA an edge over its rivals by pushing forward the quality and variety of food served and making it more representative of dining trends on the ground.

One of the key tools he has been using in this quest is the Culinary Council, a group of leading chefs employed on a consultancy basis by BA to develop dishes and come up with new ideas. "We formed the Culinary Council a couple of years ago," he says. "We wanted professional chefs on board to challenge us, shape us and push the boundaries of airline food. I chose the members carefully - a broad cross section of chefs with different skills and serving different styles of food, all of whom I admire."

Stockton adds that every chef he has approached to be on the council has agreed. "Not for the money, though," he says. "We don't pay them a fortune for their consultancy. I think they've got involved because it offers them a challenge and the opportunity to try new things."

One member of the council, Shaun Hill, says that Stockton has hit the nail on the head. "I love working with BA because it's an entirely different challenge to working in my little kitchen at the Merchant House [in Ludlow, Shropshire]," he says. "Airline food needs to be cleverly flavoured, seasoned and spiced, because people's taste-buds are dulled at altitude [see below], and it takes lots of trial and error to get this right. Because it's cooked ahead of time and then regenerated, airline food also has a tendency to dry out, and this means that braised and slow-cooked dishes work well - boeuf bourguignon or steak-and-ale pie, for example. It's nice to have an opportunity to develop those dishes because they're not the sort of thing I would normally serve in my restaurant, where I'm generally cooking delicate prime cuts to order."

Another member of the council, Michel Roux, agrees that the challenge of serving flavoursome and moist dishes in-flight, despite the logistical nightmare, gives him a kick. And he also enjoys the fact that huge numbers of people get to try his food. He says: "Only a small number of people can eat at the Waterside Inn [his business in Bray, Berkshire], but working with the airline gives me the opportunity to provide good food to several million people a year."

Meanwhile, in typically candid style, Richard Corrigan admits that "travelling the world with BA is a pretty good incentive to get involved". He adds: "It also gives me a buzz to know that people across the world are eating a salad I've created. And having the Lindsay House name printed on thousands of BA menus is bloody good publicity."

As members of the council, the chefs get together en masse once a year to brainstorm with Stockton, and individually they do several workshops a year for him and his team of six in-house chefs, presenting them with dishes that they think will work well at altitude.

Mark Edwards of Nobu emphasises just how difficult it can be to come up with such dishes. "To re-create our chocolate bento box for the airline took 40 attempts at different recipes," he says. "In order for the chocolate fondant to withstand regeneration by the stewardesses and still be moist, I eventually came up with a chocolate pellet inserted in the middle."

Similarly, to re-create his much-lauded black cod with miso for the airline took a great deal of trial and error. Hygiene regulations mean that in-flight kitchens are allowed to marinate the cod for a maximum of one day, compared with three days at Nobu. "So," he says, "I've had to create a more intense marinade for BA that ends up tasting very similar."

Once Stockton and his team are convinced that a dish has real potential, they work with one of their contractors, such as Alpha Flight Services or Gate Gourmet, to test it in mass-production. Several in-flight tastings follow, with the chefs and with passengers.

Detailed recipe specifications are finally drawn up for those found to be a success. "We also take photographs of them," says Stockton. "We have to provide exact information and recipes on every dish, as we work with 75 different airline catering companies around the world. We also have to give cabin crew detailed instructions on how to regenerate and serve each dish."

But when it comes down to it, is all this effort really worthwhile? "Absolutely," says Stockton. "I can wholeheartedly say that the Culinary Council has raised standards, and the figures prove it - 97% of our passengers now describe the food as very good or excellent, compared with 87% in 1999. What we now have to do is get the figure up to 100%."

British Airways - the innovator

As well as launching the Culinary Council, David Stockton, British Airways' head of global food and beverage, has introduced a number of other significant changes to how food is served aboard aircraft over the past two years. These include:

• The Raid the Larder service - whereby passengers can help themselves to snacks during the flight.
• Healthy eating options - denotes dishes that have been grilled instead of fried, or that have light sauces or are low in calories.
• In Club World (business class), meal orders for the entr‚e course are now taken at the start of the flight, and white linen is used as the backdrop for dishes.
• In First Class, cabin crew no longer push a food trolley through the cabin, and passengers are free to choose when they want to see a menu and when they want to eat.

Taste-buds and digestion in the air

"If you ate a meal on the ground before boarding an aircraft and then ate exactly the same meal a few hours later mid-flight, it would taste quite different," explains Peter Jones, professor of in-flight catering at the University of Surrey.

"A number of physiological and psychological changes take place when we fly, which have the effect of dulling our taste-buds and slowing our digestion down," he says. "Flying in an aircraft has a similar effect on our bodies to being halfway up a mountain. The difference in air pressure to being on the ground has a marked effect on the experience of eating."

It is estimated that there is a loss of as much as 30% in our capacity to taste, adds Jones, so, unless dishes are more highly spiced and seasoned, they can seem bland. "And the psychological impact of flying also has an effect on how dishes taste," Jones adds. "There is always some degree of anxiety felt by air travellers - either because of nerves or simply because of the stress of flying and being away from home. That results in our bodies producing adrenalin and other chemicals, which alter flavours and the way we digest."

Because of all these factors, he says, it takes a lot of trial and error by airline caterers to create dishes that are satisfying, flavoursome and easily digested.

British Airways' Culinary Council - the members

• Michel Roux, chef-patron of the Waterside Inn, Bray, Berkshire
• Shaun Hill, chef-proprietor of the Merchant House, Ludlow, Shropshire
• Richard Corrigan, chef-proprietor of Lindsay House, London
• Mark Edwards, executive chef of Nobu, London
• Liam Tomlin, executive chef of Banc, Sydney, Australia
• Claudia Fleming, pastry chef of the Gramercy Tavern, New York, USA
• Nicholas Lander, restaurant critic.

A day in the life of a British Airways meal

As British Airways passengers tuck into their airline meals, few of them are aware of the lengthy process the food has been through.

Paul Elliott, head chef of Alpha Flight Services, British Airways' supplier at London Gatwick, explains what happens to the 85,000 or so meals a week that his kitchen produces.

"We work about a day ahead of a flight leaving," he says. "We'll get the raw ingredients in the kitchen on one day, then cook them the next day and chill them down in refrigerators. Then, on the morning of the flight, the dishes will get split into individual foil containers, put on to trays and loaded on to the aircraft."

The amount by which the individual dishes are precooked on the ground varies according to the ingredients, Elliott adds. For instance, steaks and lamb meat are simply sealed but left raw in the middle because they are cooked in ovens on the aircraft directly before serving.

"We give very specific instructions to the flight crews on how the dishes should be regenerated," Elliott says, "so they taste fresh and good. And we'll quite often send a chef on flights to monitor how things are going and check food quality."

As well as supplying standard meals, Alpha also gets daily requests for special meals, for religious reasons or for those suffering from medical conditions, such as food allergies.

Niall Gordon, corporate development chef for Alpha, explains that all such requests are taken extremely seriously. "For example," he says, "recently we had to cook for a 16-year-old girl who was extremely allergic to eggs - she could die within minutes if she came into contact with them. I personally prepared her food.

"The entire area of the kitchen I worked in was sanitised, I bought new utensils, the food was sealed and locked in its own fridge, and I briefed the crew on serving it. It may sound stringent, but we felt that was the only way of dealing with the situation."

Research into in-flight catering

Last year, Surrey University in Guildford hit the headlines when it announced that it was going to appoint the first professor of in-flight catering anywhere in the world. The story no doubt raised a few eyebrows and caused much amusement in traditional academic circles. But Prof Peter Jones, who took up the post, says his is a job not to be sneezed at.

"The International Flight Catering Association provided the funding for my chair at the university," he says, "and I think their decision to do so is a reflection of the scale of the industry, the speed at which it is growing and developing, and the need for more research.

"Roughly three million meals are served in the skies every day - well over a billion a year. There are 623 flight kitchens operating worldwide, employing more than two million people directly and indirectly. In terms of value, current estimates are that this is an industry worth in excess of $15b (£10.6b) a year.

"It also seems that, these days, meals are playing an increasingly important part in customers' choice of airline and their expectations of flying."

Over the next few years, Prof Jones says that he plans to research in detail how airline kitchens work, the logistics of serving food in flight, galley design on aircraft, menu developments, and how airlines are innovating with food. "All the airlines have been very keen to lend me their support," he says, "which shows how they need objective research into this whole area."

H Following the terrorist attacks of 11 September in the USA, Jones contacted 200 flight kitchens in 30 countries to ask if they had felt any impact. His survey found a 25% drop in demand for meals, and two-thirds of kitchens had been forced to lay off staff. Jones will follow this up with a more detailed survey this year.

BA food - facts and figures

• The airline works with 75 airline catering companies across the world.

• It serves 65 million meals a year to 42 million passengers.

• In a single year, BA passengers eat their way through 41 tonnes of chicken, 45 tonnes of strawberries and 127 tonnes of tomatoes.