Knife Fight Continues After Sept. 11


COLOGNE, Germany -- Maarten Grisel holds a butter knife in one hand and the printout of a Federal Aviation Administration e-mail in the other. The e-mail confirms that the knife is dull, which is great news.

"This is a reason to celebrate," says Mr. Grisel, vice president of Sola Airline Cutlery BV, a Dutch stainless-steel maker that is a big supplier to airlines. "We can compete again."

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, aviation authorities around the world issued an open-ended ban on metal steak knives and other metal utensils. But most countries allowed some stainless-steel butter knives on board, and now Sola and a few rivals are pitching these as alternatives to the plastic knives that airlines have been using.

It's another battle in an airline tableware war that began long before Sept. 11. On one side is stainless steel, which is durable and classy but heavy and expensive, and on the other side is plastic, which is cheap and lightweight but scorned by high-paying passengers and environmentalists.

At stake is a big business. Last year, Sola sold 250 million pieces of airline tableware, including about $20 million of stainless-steel knives to 70 carriers. One customer alone, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, bought 10 million settings.

An inexpensive stainless-steel setting costs about $1, compared with less than five cents for plastic. Metal utensils' biggest cost is labor: fishing them out of the garbage, cleaning and sorting them and then repacking whole sets. Even then, a metal set averages only seven to 20 uses because lots are thrown out accidentally, and others are pocketed by passengers. Metal cutlery also weighs at least seven times as much as plastic, or the equivalent of a fare-paying passenger on a big jetliner.

After Sept. 11, plastic cutlery looked like the clear victor in the tableware war. As U.S. carriers started flying again after several days' grounding, airlines that hadn't scrapped food service needed sanctioned cutlery, and fast. Timothy Thomsen, head of procurement at the world's largest producer of airline meals, LSG Sky Chefs Inc., a unit of Germany's Deutsche Lufthansa AG, had three employees on his staff in Irving, Texas, working 18-hour days to find plastic suppliers. "Aesthetics didn't matter," he says.

But now they do, and the plastic contingent is racing to come up with implements that meet airlines' exacting design demands. At a recent trade fair of the International Flight Catering Association here, Racket Group of Kansas City, Mo., a longtime stainless-steel hawker, had on display a new art deco-styled plastic setting. Finnish food-packaging maker Huhtamaki Oyj offered see-through, rainbow-hued tableware. Medstar Industrial Co., a small Egyptian contender, had a set it claims can stand 40 washings.

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