On the flight home last night from the east to left coast (I'm not identifying the flight to protect the innocent and I do have permission to share the story) I was about to enjoy my chicken entree with vegetables when my seatmate asked if she could take a picture of the entree presentation. I said sure but was also very curious why. She indicated that she is one of the 4 meal vendors that supply UA (she also supplies other airlines) and was generating some 'feedback' on this meal which was from someone else demonstrating that is was not up to standards as she had to deal with UA's complaint on her own product. Of course this opened up an entire conversation about UA's food and her business in general. I invited her to FlyerTalk as she is likely to get really good feedback on meals and she indicated she would join. Some of the interesting tidbits I found out:

-FC meals are sold to UA for ~$4/plate. The caterers then charge ~$4/plate to assemble and load the meals on the planes.
-BOB snackboxes cost ~$3 and the caterers charge ~50cents to load
-UA can and does pull any meal after 30 days based on customer feedback
-Meals are bid out by recipe not by meal concept...so UA is the one that specifies chicken and potatoes/polenta for example. This serves to really limit the creativity of the chefs, is subject to constant revisions/approval by UA, limits how the meal tastes and looks, and adds to her costs because of the constant revisions.

I was fascinated by the conversation, particulalry how really cheap UA is getting on FC meals (for instance, the transcon ice cream cost was less than 50 cents per serve). I think we need to start a FT petition to bring better food back knowing how cheap it is (and at least offer the ice cream for $1?). I mean we pay more than that for the privilege of being acosted by the TSA. This demonstrates how cheap UA has become and we both lamented how it might get worse.