Originally Posted by
shefgab
In WT economy, it will be a big inconvenience for the crew as all the other special meals will have been delivered, as (as CWS mentions) the trays are kept separately, but the meals are also in a different oven. Some flights have up to 100 special meals, so asking for one to be kept back is the recipe for it to go missing.
When regular meals are being delivered, there is no way of guessing when a trolley will run out of trays (or hot meals) (there are only 26 trays on a trolley), so will be impossible to put the special meal aside in the top of the trolley supposedly heading your way.
Interesting to read about the logistics of this. A couple of months ago in WT, I had a chicken main dish wrongly loaded on an otherwise correct lacto-ovo veg tray. They swapped it without a problem for a veg main that was not a special preorder (and possibly not lacto-ovo, though all I was avoiding was meat so that didn’t matter), but was the first time I had come across that!