Gate Gourmet SPICE program

Airline Caterer Gate Gourmet has come a long way since it was founded from Swissair's catering operations in 1992. In the past 16 years the company has developed into a worldwide enterprise that now operates 100 flight kitchens in 26 countries and is the home base caterer for many international carriers such as LAN, British Airways, SWISS International Air Lines and Iberia, to name a few. Together with its ten partner brands - united under the umbrella brand of gategroup since 2008 - Gate Gourmet offers end-to-end services in catering and hospitality, aircraft provisioning and logistics and inflight solutions.

In its core area of designing and delivering in-flight menus, Gate Gourmet takes a highly proactive approach. "In the good old days of traditional caterers, 10 or 15 years ago, the majority of airlines would request specific dishes and the caterers would prepare them," says Beat Ehlers, Director Product Development. "Today, the airlines want us to be much more creative, coming up with conceptual designs, new recipes and new strategic collaborations to support and strengthen the airline brand.

One of the tools employed to achieve this goal is Gate Gourmet's award winning* SPICE program. SPICE stands for Sustaining Progress in Culinary Excellence and was set up to bring together the company's frontline chefs to exchange ideas, recipes and techniques, and to develop professional presentation formats for an ever demanding airline clientele.

Quarterly workshops are dedicated to combining culinary skills with attractive meal presentation techniques and innovative new product solutions. To this end Gate Gourmet conducts regular market research and trend analyses, through third parties and at trade shows. Customer feedback about menu presentations is taken into account as well as information obtained from flight crews on what passengers really appreciate.

Food trend analyses are a valuable source of information for the development of new airline meal concepts. The demand for healthier food, a preference for regional products as opposed to global brands and an increased interest in fairly traded products or high quality convenience food items are just some of the recent trends that are being taken into account by the Gate Gourmet SPICE team when preparing a meal presentation for a customer.

"We make a point of not only obtaining data on global key trends but also do research on a regional level to find out what will work best for a Latin American, a Middle Eastern or a European carrier," says Ehlers. "Our ambition is to provide our customers with a new twist to their inflight offering and to be able to present them with new, attractive yet cost-effective and perhaps unexpected alternatives. Innovative light weight packaging and equipment solutions designed by gategroup partners deSter and potmstudios ideally complement our inflight service concepts and meet the airline's growing concern of saving weight and thus fuel."

In today's airline market with its many catering concepts from the traditional legacy carriers to low cost airlines selling food on-board to business jet charter flights, finding the best possible solution at a competitive price for each individual airline is what the SPICE team is all about.

* At the March 2007 ITCA (International Travel Catering Association) convention in Cologne, Germany, Gate Gourmet was awarded the Silver Mercury Award in the Category "Training and Skills Development" for its SPICE program.