Galley equipment comes in 2 basic universal standards - namely ATLAS and KSSU. These have their origins in legacy maintenance resource pools (ATLAS = Alitalia, TAP, Lufthansa, Air France, Sabena and KSSU = KLM, Swissair, SAS, UTA) and have subsequently developed into industry standards to enable modular equipment interchange.

Every piece of ATLAS-standard equipment is able to fit in any ATLAS galley on any airline or aircraft type worldwide, and the same goes for KSSU-standard equipment. ATLAS is today's leader for worldwide marketshare with about 75% of galley equipment manufactured being either ATLAS-standard or ATLAS-compatible. KSSU has about a 20% market share and a handful of legacy carriers with proprietary standards (BA has a proprietary standard called "ACE" for example) account for the remaining 5%.

Equipment standards include specs for everything ranging from carts to oven racks to coffee pots to plastic cups to storage boxes. A variation of even a single millimeter from the standard could result in equipment not being able to stow securely and the consequent safety issues that result.

Most equipment is actually manufactured by the same companies. Rotable equipment (carts, etc..) are manufactured by companies such as Driessen (www.driessen.com) and Diethelm-Keller (www.diethelmkelleraviation.com) and consumables (trays, cups, etc...) by companies such as DeSter (www.dester.com -- part of GateGroup) and Helios (www.helios-mppd.nl). These companies either provide airlines with branded/generic versions of existing designs or develop entirely new product lines within the existing standards.