Buy airline meals in the supermarket: Finnair sells its business class food on the ground

Finland's national carrier Finnair has started selling its business class meals in a supermarket to prevent job cuts at its catering unit due to COVID-19.

The airplane meals have quickly turned into a hit with 1,600 meals sold within days at the supermarket located near Finnair's main hub the Helsinki-Vantaa airport, Finnair said. It plans to sell in more outlets.

"There are redundancies and layoffs going on already at Finnair and we are trying our best to find new innovative ways," head of Finnair Kitchen Marika Nieminen told Reuters.

Finnair Kitchen's first main courses on the ground, for 12.9 euros ($15.2) apiece, comprise beef with teriyaki-radish sauce served with grilled spring onion and rice or smoked arctic char with chantarelle risotto.

Marika Nieminen, Head of Finnair kitchen and Juha Stenholm, Finnair Kitchen Chief pose for a picture in Vantaa, Finland, October 22, 2020. Picture taken October 22, 2020. REUTERS/Attila Cser

"In this desperate remote work environment this is a small, nice taste of normal life," Mika, a customer from Vantaa said. In 2017, Finnair stopped outsourcing its catering services by buying LSG Sky Chefs, a company that operated at Finland's main airport, from a Lufthansa subsidiary and renamed it Finnair Kitchen.

A year later, Finnair Kitchen produced some 12,000 meals a day but the numbers collapsed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit air travel. Nieminen said Finnair planned to introduce new dishes, including reindeer meat from Finnish Lapland and Japanese-style pork shoulder, for supermarkets.

Finnair said last Tuesday it would cut around 700 jobs by March 2021.