Airplane food is back, but it’s not like you remember

Full airline menus are back — but say goodbye to pre-meal cocktails, warm cookies and a lot of chitchat with your flight attendants.

After cutting most food service during the pandemic, airlines are once again offering premium dishes such as miso-marinated cod, Greek chicken salad and braised short ribs to entice the big spenders who buy first- and business-class seats.

But COVID-19 has forced changes in the way they serve food and drinks, as well as some usual offerings such as snacks, to reduce interaction between fliers and flight attendants.

"I miss that smell in the cabin," Los Angeles resident Anasia Obioha said as she reminisced about the American Airlines chocolate-chip cookies that were missing from her recent flights.

Obioha, who works in corporate communications, said her meals on several first-class flights to and from Mexico reminded her of the lunches served on trays in the cafeteria in elementary school. All her dishes were prepackaged and cold, she said.

To help return airlines to profitability, carriers are meeting the recent uptick in travel demand by expanding their onboard offerings to include the kind of high-end meals and drinks that were popular with first- and business-class travelers before the pandemic. After all, the nation's airlines lost a combined $35 billion in 2020, after seven consecutive years of profitability, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In-flight meals, drinks and airport lounges are not significant revenue generators but are essential to attracting first- and business-class fliers, who made up as little as 5% of all passenger traffic before the pandemic but generated about 30% of all passenger revenues, according to the International Air Transport Association, an airline trade group.

"Airlines want to attract people who go to the upper- and firstclass cabins," said Michael Taylor, practice lead for travel at J.D. Power, a data analytics and consumer information company.

These passengers are highly coveted because they often book high-price last-minute tickets and buy the most expensive seats at the front of the plane.

Among the most noticeable changes in the cabin are to meal courses, previously dished out on separate plates in upper-class cabins. Now they get served all at once on large trays.

"We're offering all courses at once to limit the handling of trays, dinnerware and glasses between our guests and flight attendants," said Alaska Airlines spokesperson Ray Lane.

In the aisle, instead of pouring drinks into plastic cups from food carts, flight attendants are now handing passengers throughout the plane full cans or bottles of beer, soda, wine or hard seltzer to eliminate the pouring time.

Many of the changes to inflight food service have been made at the behest of the nation's flight attendants, who have been hard hit by the pandemic. An estimated 4,000 flight attendants on U.S. carriers have contracted the virus and 20 have died, according to the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines.

"AFA has pressed airline management on aspects of food and beverage to ensure procedures best support fewer touch points or inconsistent masking," said Sara Nelson, president of the association. "The Delta variant has caused cases to skyrocket again, threatening lives, continued virus mutation, and recovery from this pandemic."