How to prepare 110 million meals in Dubai

An Emirates Flight Catering facility in Dubai. This is where appetisers, cheeses and dips are prepared. Emirates Airline's regionally-inspired cuisine and extensive drinks menu won the "Best Beverage in the Middle East" award at Apex 2020 in Singapore on Wednesday, November 13, 2019.

Emirates recently won the Best Food & Beverage award (and Best WiFi service) from Apex 2020 Regional Passenger Choice Awards. Emirates is known for its regionally-inspired cuisine and extensive drinks menu.

Emirates runs a round-the-clock kitchen with 1,800 chefs based in Dubai whipping up 12,450 recipes. This requires meticulous planning, and requires quality ingredients to be sourced and recipes created in a timely manner.

Emirates Flight Catering’s 130,000-sq-ft facility will harvest 2,700kg of herbicide- and pesticide-free leafy greens a day at full production.

Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC) follows the ‘farm to fork’ concept, which secures its own supply chain of locally-sourced, fresh vegetables, but it significantly reduces the company's environmental footprint as well. EKFC’s 130,000 square foot vertical farm, located next door to the Expo 2020 site in Dubai South, will produce 2,700 kilos of herbicide- and pesticide-free leafy greens every day, using 99 per cent less water than outdoor fields.

Emirates Flight Catering's philosophy for in-flight meals is “to do it restaurant-style, trying to stay as traditional as possible to make the food taste great”. That means serving 125,000 restaurant-style meals a day, reaching 150,000 in summer months when airport traffic is at its peak.

Food being served in business class (left) and economy class. Vegan meals had already ranked as the third most commonly requested meal in economy class, but after this drive, requests for plant-based alternative increased by over 40 per cent, showing a growing need to go green, the airline said on Tuesday.

Some 65% of all the airline's meals are made in Dubai. The rest come from its catering stations around the globe, with 24 in the Asia Pacific region alone.

Each day, the Emirates Flight Catering's Central Commissary Unit (CCU) processes 15 tonnes of vegetables, 9 tonnes of fruits and 30 tonnes of meat. A line for producing pasta and ice cream was recently introduced, using around 3,300 tonnes of flour annually to produce 45,000 pastries daily. EKFC also serves 120 international airlines.

In a typical Emirates airline flight, the meal that is set before passengers is decided a year earlier, picked from a range of recipes, made with ingredients from farms in Al Ain or as far away as Australia, and prepared by skilled chefs — many of whom have Michelin star experience.

The Emirates Flight Catering facility in Dubai. Each day, tonnes of food, catering equipment and bonded goods are unloaded into the ground floor of the three-storeyed Emirates Flight Catering building, which has a footprint the size of two and a-half rugby fields, near Dubai's airport.

Special food trucks that take the airline food from the EKFC's industrial kitchen to the aircraft.

In June 2018, Emirates Flight Catering signed a joint venture Crop One Holdings to build the world’s largest vertical farm in Dubai.

Members of Emirates Flight Catering’s experienced culinary team are made up of 1,800 chefs from 52 countries.

Airlines catered by EKFC in Dubai, including Emirates, get sustainably-grown greens in their in in-flight meals

Emirates Flight Catering company's executive chefs, who are from 45 countries, are responsible for planning all meals across routes.

Each year, more than 110 million meals are served on board Emirates' restaurant in the sky with the same attention to detail in First, Business and Economy Class.

The first airline meal was served back in 1919 on a Handley Page flight from London to Paris. Almost a century later, the scale of airline meals is staggering, nowhere more so than at the Emirates Catering facility in Dubai.

Emirates Flight Catering staff checks the food before delivery to customers. EKFC runs one of the world's largest kitchens.

Fresh produce grown at the world’s largest vertical farm will be served to millions at Expo 2020 Dubai as part of a collaboration with Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC) to provide delicious and diverse culinary choices while showcasing the future of sustainable gastronomy COURTESY Expo 2020

The company has replaced cardboard packaging with reusable crates to store and transport an average of 100,000 inflight meals daily. As a result of its newest environmental initiative, EKFC will save 750 tonnes of cardboard waste, the equivalent of 260,000 m² (65 acres) of mature woodland, annually.

A regionally-themed meal prepared by Emirates Flight Catering. Up to 180,000 meals every day are prepared for more than 400 daily flights to 142 destinations.

Premium flyers enjoy Emirates' lounge on board the A380. The airline has a fleet of A380s that fly to more than 50 cities on six continents, serving 130 million passengers.

Emirates is the world's largest flying restaurant, 209 meals a minutes and catering to 520 flight daily and serving.