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The age old question: chicken or fish?

With options of two different meals on a lot of flights, how are the ratios of each calculated?

50/50 would be the most obvious but it doesn't seem to work like that.

Often it will be that:

We've run out of the noodles, is rice okay?

It cannot be that every flight of people orders exactly the same as one another.

How are individual meal ratios figured out for in-flight dining?

Mou某
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    Why do you think it doesn't work 50/50? Just your presumption or do you have any evidence of it? – Neusser Nov 28 '16 at 09:12
  • In my experience badly :-) – JenniP Nov 28 '16 at 09:18
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    Works just like any other restaurant, you estimate initial popularity, then as time goes by you adjust based on actual orders. With time you get a good handle on passenger preferences. Most airlines have had these ratios dialed for a long time. –  Nov 28 '16 at 10:31
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is not about travel but about logistics. Perhaps it fits on [Aviation.SE]? – gerrit Nov 28 '16 at 14:10
  • Short answer: Historical Data. Meals are provisioned just like any other resource. – DTRT Nov 28 '16 at 17:01
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    @gerrit It's off-topic for Aviation, also. Questions about "the 'passenger aspects' of commercial air travel" are explicitly off-topic there. – reirab Nov 29 '16 at 07:03
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    @gerrit Actually, the on-topic page for Aviation says to send such questions here. :) – reirab Nov 29 '16 at 07:21
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about the science of meal catering. – JonathanReez Nov 29 '16 at 11:07
  • Pretty sure I've never been offered fish on a flight. – David Richerby Jun 12 '19 at 09:39

5 Answers5

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Same way any restaurant catering is done: first you guess, then you iterate. Airlines frequently repeat the same meals over and over again, so it doesn't take very long to get to a reasonably good balance, and of course the big carriers worked out their beef vs chicken ratios years ago.

Update: An interesting story about using AI to optimize this: https://skift.com/2018/11/05/airlines-hope-algorithms-can-finally-fix-their-drink-carts/

lambshaanxy
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    This seems plausible but is there any evidence of it or is it your guess? – Blaszard Nov 28 '16 at 09:25
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    http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=773353 – lambshaanxy Nov 28 '16 at 09:29
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    @Blaszard What other possible way is there? You need to choose how many of a meal to load onto the plane, the first time you use it, so you need to make some kind of estimate. And it would be ridiculous not to later adjust the proportions in light of actual customer demand. – David Richerby Nov 28 '16 at 10:43
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    @Blaszard - First he guessed, then he iterated :) – paj28 Nov 28 '16 at 12:12
  • They might have worked out ratios years ago, but is demand changing over time? – vclaw Nov 28 '16 at 13:06
  • Same as any restaurant catering, or same as any computer programming project management? :) – Golden Cuy Nov 29 '16 at 06:20
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    @DavidRicherby One other possible way is to take orders in advance. :) Some airlines actually do this, especially in premium cabins (Singapore, for example.) Another option is to only have one 'normal' option and require passengers with special dietary requirements to request something else in advance. Air France does that on short/medium-haul flights, for example. As a side note, I was amused by the fact that the default economy meal was ham on a flight from Paris to Tel Aviv. – reirab Nov 29 '16 at 07:15
  • @reirab Book the Cook on SQ is primarily for ordering meals not otherwise available on board. You can also order on board, but the selection is limited. – lambshaanxy Nov 29 '16 at 08:43
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    @reirab Good points but the question is clearly asking about the case where there are multiple options and passengers don't order in advance. If there's only one option or passengers order in advance, there's no problem to solve. – David Richerby Nov 29 '16 at 08:50
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    @jpatokal, the link you provided adds that for 1st class and business they load a 100% of each meal type. To ensure high valued customers always receive their first choice. Perhaps worth adding that to your answer. – gmauch Nov 29 '16 at 12:15
  • @gmauch That would almost certainly vary from one airline to the next. The post immediately before that one (from someone who works for an airline) said their airline didn't do that. Honestly, I'd guess most don't load a meal of each type for every passenger in F or J, though I wouldn't be surprised if the total number of F/J meals loaded exceeds the number of passengers in those cabins on most flights. They can't really reuse meals after a flight, so that would generate a huge amount of food waste if they actually loaded each meal type for every passenger in the premium cabins. – reirab Nov 29 '16 at 14:33
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    "first you guess, then you iterate" there is a name for this strategy. It's called science. – zzzzBov Nov 29 '16 at 15:51
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    For full service airlines, first class (and usually business class) are counted and confirmed eg. 1 hour before departure. This is because they're so expensive to provide. They'll load that number of meals exactly, plus a few more as backups. They can also run an 'LMC' catering truck to the aircraft for last minute changes. Economy is just a formula based on flight history - they count how many meals are returned to estimate this. There's always an 'extras' factor added in too. But in economy, they can run out of meals, because they don't load a full set for every pax if they can avoid it. – Pete855217 Oct 06 '17 at 04:58
  • @Pete855217 Sounds like you're familiar with the topic, how about adding an answer of your own? – lambshaanxy Oct 08 '17 at 01:10
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I was recently on Philippine Airlines from Manila to Sydney. We were down the back and suspected they'd run out of what looked to be the most popular. Shrug, we took the second option. Man behind us - however, was fuming (he'd complained about everything already - the seat, the wine, the people around him) and had a good rant to the steward about it.

She explained the ratio was set at 70/30 for the two dishes, and unfortunately sometimes it just doesn't work out if more people get it, obviously.

Anyway, the point was that for PR at least, it's not 50/50 as someone in the comments alluded to, but I'm sure at least some airlines would go for a different ratio, especially if they have more than two options, as airlines like Emirates sometimes do.

Mark Mayo
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The problem with topics like this is always that this kind of information has limited scientific use but a lot of commercial value. There will have been hundreds if not thousands of internal studies done on this since the beginning of commercial flight but the results of those will all be classified as trade secrets. That information is only intended for use by the airline that paid for it, compiled its own data and ran its own market tests. The formulas involved are meant to balance customer satisfaction against operational costs and there will be dozens of factors involved: origin, destination, passenger demographics, date/time/duration of the flight, what options are available and so on. Beyond just determining the ratio, the airline also has to decide how many options to offer which adds another layer of complexity.

For established routes the major driver will simply be historical data. After a couple of thousand flights you can fairly accurately predict the ratios and even determine the impact of certain events and holidays ahead of time. Post-Thanksgiving guilt or fresh New Year's resolutions might drive up the vegetarian ratio for instance.

While it may seem a bit melodramatic to talk about this level of secrecy for something so simple, you have to remember that the airline industry is all about margins and lowering costs to remain competitive. Until an airline has sufficient information about a particular flight's meal patterns it will be faced with either higher costs and wasted food, or unhappier customers.

Lilienthal
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    This is all good stuff, but as for your specific example at the end, airlines generally don't guess at the number of kosher meals (ignore El Al for this one) or other special-order meals people will request; they tally up all the orders for special meals in advance and send them to the catering company responsible for the flight so they can prepare that many special meals and ensure they are on board. If you ask for a kosher meal or a special low-sodium meal or whatever and you didn't order one sufficiently far in advance, you're pretty unlikely to get one. – Zach Lipton Nov 29 '16 at 09:34
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    @ZachLipton Yeah, kosher was a bad example but on reflection such obvious mistakes are unlikely to ever happen these days. Even if they lack the specific metrics, no airline these days will forget about kosher meals when setting up a new flight to Israel or fail to account for vegetarian options when flying to India. The main point is rather that it will take time and effort to establish that kind of data for new flights and that data is necessary to reduce cost and waste. – Lilienthal Nov 29 '16 at 09:46
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    @MartinBonner -- your last sentence is probably the most valuable point in the entire discussion. – Simba Nov 29 '16 at 16:27
  • Wait, the crew really has to eat the leftovers meals normally? What happens if a flight attendant is vegetarian, for instance? – Federico Poloni Nov 30 '16 at 07:12
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    @FedericoPoloni Probably depends on the airline but one assumes that they simply register their meal preference like a passenger would and are smart enough to keep theirs in reserve. I wouldn't be surprised if some airlines charge them for it though. It's common practice for the crew to pick from the remaining meals, though I'd hope they at least get to pick from the first class meals as well. – Lilienthal Nov 30 '16 at 08:34
  • One other common move in the industry for short-haul flights. Move as much of the meal as possible to pre-packaged e.g. muffins. This means they don't have to cook up stuff for a flight, and can order in advance. Qantas have done this big-time, and reduced their catering facility requirements considerably. The vast majority of the actual food is now outsourced, and Qantas just load the carts as opposed to cook anything. Some of the suppliers also make up the traysets entirely. – Pete855217 Oct 06 '17 at 05:04
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I can't tell you what happens on an airline, but I was told by the head chef of a large cruise ship that he has on his computer how many of each meal have been served for the last three years, nicely separated by nationality, which lets him make very reliable forecasts. In case of a cruise ships things are even more complicated because behaviour changes throughout a cruise (people eat a lot more on the first day, and less on the last day).

gnasher729
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As others have said, they use the average from many previous flights to work out the ratio. With large numbers (lets say 525 for an A380), you can tell that the actual number will come pretty close to the average.

I ran 2000 simulations in Excel, modelling a flight where they know, on average, 70% choose option A, 30% choose Option B on a 525 seat A380. The flight elects to take 404 of option A (10% more than they need on average) and 173 of option B (again, 10% spare).

The flight never ran out of option A in any of the 2000 'flights'. The flight ran out of option B 140 times (7%).

They can do better, by having a smaller % buffer on the more popular meal, due to how the law of large numbers works. Taking 15% spares on the less popular meal, and 7.8% spares on the more popular meal (which means taking 10% spare meals in total) reduces the number of times that the airline ran out of option B to 22 (1.1%), whilst still never running out of option A. There is likely further optimisation that could occur, 15% and 7.8% was the only number I tried other than the 10% for each.

This link here implies that the cabin crew (but presumably not the flight crew who have to eat different meals to each other) are made to eat whatever is not chosen by the passengers. On an A380, this is a 27 buffer out of 525 (just over 5%), so this is the minimum possible buffer an airline could use. But presumably they would at the very least have a few extra meals so that no-one goes hungry if one meal is dropped.

Assuming they bring 5 'spare meals', plus 27 for the flight crew and the flight is at 80% occupancy, that puts the buffer on meals at 32/420. However, those 420 meals for customers won't all be normal meals, but that 27 buffer is just for normal meals. Vegetarianism in the USA is 3.2%, and when you add in Gluten Free, Dairy Free and Kosher, we could easily reach 5%. That least us with a buffer of 32 out of 399, or 8%. With only 5 meals at risk of going in the bin each flight.

Results will be worse on smaller planes, which may be where conflicting anecdotal evidence from domestic short haul flights comes from.

Scott
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    The question asks what airlines do. I'm pretty sure that airlines don't toss 10% of the meals they buy in the garbage, just to make it more likely that almost every passenger gets their first-choice meal. Indeed, anybody who's sat in whatever part of the cabin gets served last will be very familiar with having reduced or no choice. – David Richerby Nov 29 '16 at 22:42
  • I take it from your experience that you fly US airlines? I did include a disclaimer based on airline so your criticism seems odd. Virtually all airlines DO take excess meals to give people their choice. – Scott Nov 29 '16 at 23:44
  • Same experience on American, BA, Delta, KLM, United. So [citation needed] for your claims about "virtually all airlines." – David Richerby Nov 29 '16 at 23:46
  • @ David Richerby - you point to all the airlines in a country famous for having terrible airlines as evidence that all airlines are bad? Give me a bit, I'll find some links. – Scott Nov 29 '16 at 23:50
  • First link - http://www.worldairlineawards.com/awards/world_airline_rating.html

    You can't judge someone like Quantas at number 9 (whom I know from experience carry a spare vegetarian meal on board just in case anyone forgot to tick the dietary requirements box ) based on the actions of American Airways at 77.

     – Scott Nov 29 '16 at 23:58
  • Could you explain how that link backs up your claim? And can you explain how Qantas (note spelling) carrying one extra vegetarian meal is in any way comparable to your suggestion of carring 50 spare meals? – David Richerby Nov 30 '16 at 00:04
  • Main links in the body. 8% would appear to be the minimum feasible buffer for budget airlines. I cannot find any links implying that higher rated/priced airlines carry more meals than budget airlines. – Scott Nov 30 '16 at 00:16
  • How does your simulation work? How can you know the variance in meal selections from the average unless you work in a catering department and have the data? – Zach Lipton Nov 30 '16 at 00:41
  • @Scott Did you link the right page? I'm not seeing any links, just a list of 100 airlines. – David Richerby Nov 30 '16 at 01:03
  • @ Zach - no need for any specialised catering experience for the analysis. It flips a biased coin for each passenger, giving a 70% chance of choosing A and 30% chance of choosing B. Knowing what the ratio is is the only part that requires specific catering knowledge. The model counts the number of people choosing A, and compares it to the number of meal A that was brought, and does tte same for B. It then reports any shortfalls. The simulation is run 2000 times, and that tells us the % chance of a shortage in each meal type. – Scott Nov 30 '16 at 01:40
  • 4 flight crews and 27 cabin crews. – vasin1987 Nov 30 '16 at 01:56
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    As opposed to simulations, you can compute the probabilities of running out of meals exactly with some easy maths. – Federico Poloni Nov 30 '16 at 07:15
  • You could Federico. I find simulations easier. – Scott Dec 01 '16 at 02:07
  • One other thing: many airlines still have specific crew meals, which are completely different to the passenger meals. Apart from tech crew (who have different meals, or rather meals made in different facilities to minimise food poisoning), these airlines give cabin crew what they've negotiated in their industrial agreements. This food is often simpler/healthier than the pax meals. – Pete855217 Oct 06 '17 at 05:06