What Happens to Inflight Meals That Go Untouched?

ANA serves a variety of inflight meals on its international flights, but what happens to the food that never gets touched?

The quantity of meals loaded on a flight is decided less than an hour before departure based on the number of reservations. If reservations are canceled after that time, it’s not possible to reduce the number of extra meals, so they are discarded upon arrival at the destination.

In this post, we’ll introduce a project by the Asia/Oceania Office of ANA’s Singapore Branch, who considered whether the extra inflight meals could be put to good use.

Food Bank Singapore (Food BANK), a non-profit organization, accepts food that would otherwise be thrown away and delivers it to organizations serving the needy. In June 2016, ANA partnered with Food BANK to donate unused inflight meals.

But to do that, ANA needed to overcome two hurdles.

First, it required that the food be safely stored for a long period of time until delivery to the recipients. Upon discussion with ANA Catering Service, which provides ANA’s inflight meals, the snack bags served in economy class on ANA843 from Haneda to Singapore were identified as items that met this requirement. After monitoring the flight for several days, they discovered that on average, about five snack bags remained unserved on each flight. This confirmed that food had been going to waste.

Second, ANA needed to determine whether inflight meals flown from Japan could legally be donated in Singapore. ANA had several discussions with SATS, the catering company in Singapore, and the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority (AVA) of Singapore, and was given permission to donate the snacks on the condition that several rules were followed.

After meeting the requirements, a cross-border system for donating the snacks was implemented on October 17. Upon arrival in Singapore, the flight attendants would put aside the unused snack bags, and SATS would collect and store them until monthly pick-up by Food BANK.

168 snack bags were gathered during the 23 days until the first collection date – an average of seven to eight bags a day. An ANA team member involved in the project commented, “It made me realize how much food was being thrown away every day.”

The collected snack bags are delivered to various locations by Food BANK.

A member of our team recently had the opportunity to accompany the Food BANK staff to deliver the snacks to a student care center run by Bethel Community Services in Aljunied, in central Singapore.

The team member was moved to see how excited the children got when all the snacks were brought in. “The snacks that would have otherwise been wasted reached the children and brought big smiles to their faces. What a thrill to see that first hand.”

This project is currently limited to Singapore, but it could be replicated in other countries. We will continue activities like this that are unique to ANA Group, in Japan and abroad, with the “wings of our hearts.”