Emirates Flight Catering: 38 million meals a year. Take a tour of the super facility that has one of the world's biggest operations of its kind to cater meals to Emirates flights and other airlines.
Read the full article on gulfnews.com - 190 meals per minute, 1,200 chefs, 590 flights daily, 32 years http://bit.ly/2HWkAzS
See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos
Read the full article on gulfnews.com - 190 meals per minute, 1,200 chefs, 590 flights daily, 32 years http://bit.ly/2HWkAzS
See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos
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00:00It's not your average kitchen. With around 450 chefs preparing meals for over 1,500 different
00:13menus, the Emirates Flight Catering Facility in Dubai is the largest of its kind in the
00:18world in terms of volume throughput, with the design capacity for 130,000 meal trays
00:23per day.
00:26This facility, EKFC1, opened seven years ago. We're currently doing 125,000 meals per day
00:31for Emirates Airline. First, we plan out our menus that we'll run for the year. Our central
00:36purchasing department procures all of our produce. We bring it into the facility where
00:40it's prepped, prepared, cooked, blast chilled, and then dished into the airline casseroles.
00:46We bring in our foodstuffs from all around the world. Our beef is from the U.S., our
00:51salmon is from Norway, lamb from Australia, fresh produce from all across Europe, your
00:57fruits and vegetables. We source it wherever we can find the right quality. In our kitchens,
01:02we have chefs from 43 different nationalities. This ranges from everywhere. America, Switzerland,
01:09Canada, India, Pakistan, Philippines, China, Japan, Nepal, Myanmar. A large variety of
01:16chefs here. Because we produce so many different types of regional food, so we need chefs from
01:20each of the origins of our regions. Our catering facility is all latest high-tech kitchen
01:26solutions. From our cooking of rat pans or ovens or roasting, all of our chillers operate
01:32on a saltwater brine system rather than your normal average condensers, which is softer
01:38on the food but maintains temperature very well. We have separate kitchens, as you'll
01:43see when you go around. We have a kitchen for all our special meals, which are dietetic
01:48or religious backgrounds. This is the cold kitchen area. We're producing all our appetizers,
01:52salads, sandwiches, and fruits from this section. There's about 100 staff working here 24-7.
01:59So here, they're putting together the Arabic mezza for business class for all of tonight's
02:04flights going out to Europe. Right here in the cold kitchen, they're putting together
02:07the cold-cut plates for breakfast service. This area of the hot kitchen is cooking for
02:13the subcontinent, so that's about it. The shrimps you saw before is for the prawn biryani.
02:21The pastry and bakery cooking area. We make all our own Arabic sweets in-house. Fadi loves
02:28that. All the baking ovens, the meringues we make. Basically, we do everything except
02:36Arabic bread. This is the bakery area. Basically, right here, they're making chocolate chip
02:41muffins, and in the back, he's making the mixture for cheesecake. As soon as the trolleys
02:48are received from the aircraft at the uploading bay, they are segregated into food, beverages,
02:53duty-free trolleys, and dirty equipment. An electric monorail system transports 7,500
03:02millicarts per day. The monorail is a system that we have at EKFC that's basically used
03:13to transport pallets from the ground floor to the first floor automatically. The monorail
03:24system is also used to transport airline carts from the warewash to the warewashing lines for
03:33the carts to then be stripped. The carts are then sent to the mezzanine floor, where they
03:40go through an industrial cart washing machine. In the warewash, over 2 million items such as
03:48cutlery and glassware are washed and sanitized in a series of specially designed machines.
03:53The machine behind us is the economy warewashing line made by Hobart. This machine is basically
04:02designed to wash the in-bay tray sets, and the machine can wash roughly 1,200 trays per hour.
04:10Now, we have 10 of these machines all running at the same time, and that gives us an overall
04:19warewash capacity of 170,000 trays per day. Okay, this is the MS Airline high bay store.
04:29Within the store, there is roughly 24 hours worth of stock, which is replenished several times a
04:40day. If we have any shortfalls in the working floor to the equipment or consumable items,
04:46we basically take the items from the high bay store, we process them through the operation
04:52and production department, and then the stock gets replenished by an off-site store. This
04:58happens 24-7. This chiller is operating in the region of 2 to 3 degrees. The reason why it's 2
05:07to 3 degrees, we have to make sure when this flight is dispatched from this chiller and it's
05:15loaded into the high loader, the food has to be below 8 degrees. And the reason why we have very,
05:24very strict temperature guidelines or systems in place is when this food is served to the
05:33passenger on board, the food has not been subjected to any temperature abuse, so when
05:40the passenger gets the food in front of them, the salads are fresh, the hors d'oeuvres are fresh,
05:47the sweets are fresh. What you see behind me is the business class high loader being loaded with
05:58the business class items. All the items will get loaded into the truck, all the non-food items.
06:05Once all the non-food items have been loaded, the food items will then be taken out of the
06:11chiller. They'll be put into the truck. The items will then be secured in place by a strap. Once
06:21that happens, the shutter door will be closed and the vehicle will then be dispatched to the aircraft
06:25two hours before departure. Meal carts are later on transported by van to the aircraft, satisfying
06:33the sky-high appetites of passengers across the globe. Natalie Long for Golf News.