World’s Largest Airline Kitchen – Emirates Flight Catering

I visited the world’s largest airline kitchen - Emirates Flight Catering. On an average day, the kitchen produced 225,000 meals and over 1 billion meals since its inception. Join me for the eye-opening behind the scenes tour.

My tour started at the end of an A380 flight, over 100 used trollies, leftover food, and dirty items arrived at Emirates Flight Catering for offloading and cleaning. On average, over 3 million items are being cleaned every day by mega washing machines. The cleaned trolley and item are then board on a “monorail” to travel to the other side of the building for packing.

The next stop is the hot food kitchen. Emirates has a separate kitchen section for Western food, Asian food, Arabic food and Indian food. Executive chef James Griffith showed me around each section. After the food is cooked, they go into chillers for 4 hours before arriving at portioning and packaging for flight. I witnessed the cooking by specification and weighting of food to ensure consistency. At the tray build-up area, new trays and portioned food were then loaded onto the cleaned trolley. All catering were then kept chilled before being taken by high loader truck into the airplane for passengers.

Last, I visited World’s largest vertical farm, Bustanica which produces fresh lettuce for Emirates Flight Kitchen from farm to fork in just 14 hours! The vegetables were grown sustainably without using soil and fertilizer.