Inflight catering changes
 

Just noticed changes in snacks, salad, and sandwich options...

http://www.frontierairlines.com/fron...ht-catering.do

I believe there are also some beverage modifications.

I like the new selections!

Who's handling the catering these days?

Used to be Mader's restaurant in Milwaukee during the good old days. I guess they might still use the same outfit for the MKE operation, but DEN is a different story of course.

Very astute..the Mader's and Udi's names are no longer visible on the F9 website, which used to state:

If the caterer is changed, hope it's not SkyChefs. :td:

What, you don't like rats in your food?

JUST KIDDING! :D

Not updated on that page is the two big changes in drinks... Fat Tire and The Glenlivet in the adult section. This is per their facebook blast.


Way to go on Fat Tire, Frontier. About time.

Unless it's changed in recent months, in Denver Frontier does its own catering, using a good portion of the Continental/Chelsea flight kitchen.

Hot breakfast option is now available, with the addition of pancakes and sausage patty, served along with yogurt. The cost is $6.50. It's available on flights from DEN to MDW, FLL, LAX, SNA, PDX, SAC, SAN, SFO, SEA, & DCA.

The new selection is being billed as "Our First Hot Breakfast." Remember the hot breakfasts that were served by YX?

Fat Tire has been available for a little while now on F9 iirc. The hot breakfast is cool though.

I don't foresee this breakfast offering coming anywhere near the breakfasts of the good old days.

Pancakes cooked an hour or more prior not so hot. Why didn't they choose Belgian Waffles instead? they don't get near as soggy and flat.

Maybe it's something they'll put into their breakfast rotation, but I don't recall waffles ever being an inflight hot options on Midwest or anybody else (though my exposure to other airline hot breakfasts is pretty limited). I would think good waffles would be nearly impossible in the re-heated world of airline food because fresh waffles should be nearly crisp. Fresh off the griddle pancakes are soft. Certainly you can screw up pancakes, of course, but I think their natural texture is more forgiving than waffles.

Clearly the ovens are not scheduled to go away anytime soon, as at least one or two inside employees posted quite confidently in recent months in other forums. Plenty seems changable at Frontier these days, so of course one can never say never. And perhaps the hot breakfast will not be successful. However I would guess that there is enough uptake on catering that they are expanding it with tests of a hot breakfast option. The ovens used for cookies after 10:00am are available for hot breakfast in the morning. That's just what the old YX used to do. Pre-2002 the cookies used to only be on lunch flights because breakfast and dinner had a hot option which used the ovens. Lunch entrees were both cold. The cookies only became standard on everything after 10:00am when the hot entrees stopped in post-9/11 cutbacks.

It's good to see signs like this of Frontier considering customer experience improvements rather than blindly racing to the bottom of the ULCC model. That doesn't necessarily mean this particular effort will necessarily prove to be worth it. I hope it will be. But with the ultra-low-cost-carrier tag being thrown around liberally, one has visions of coin-operated overhead bins and bring-your-own-stadium-cushion seating. Things like this suggest Frontier won't necessarily become as spartan as some ULCC's seem to be.

The list of markets with the hot breakfast struck me as a few hand-picked test markets at first, but when I looked further I think it makes sense. It's available on all domestic Airbus breakfast flights departing from Denver. If the list of destinations seems short, remember that most eastbound flights from Denver depart after 10:00am, and the only westbound flights from Denver long enough for full meal service are to the west coast....destinations like LAS, SLC and PHX are too short. The hot entree is more complicated and demanding, so I could see them not attempting to cater hot breakfast out of their big flock outstation-originating cities anytime soon. That's especially true if they are not able to round-trip cater hot entrees.

On a separate catering note, I finally had the opportunity to try the fruit and cheese plate. I didn't expect it because I was on the 11:30am DCA-MKE flight, and being under 700 miles it's not billed as having BOB food. It contained a bunch of red grapes and another of green grapes (about 10-12 each), some apple slices, five crackers, and five different cheeses...gouda, shallot cheddar, brie, a peppered jack and a basil cheese (for which I can't recall the base cheese). A nice combination of tastes to mix and match with the fruit, especially if you let the cheese lose a bit of its chill. Much better than the cheese curds they used to sell. Cheese curds need to be rather fresh, and they are far better at room temperature...the stuff sold onboard was not fresh enough and an icy cold mass of curds. The cheese in the fruit and cheese plate were individual pieces loose within the tray (not a vacuum-packed compressed mass like the curds) and tasted much better. I hope they are successfull with this offering.

I don't recall waffles, either, but I do know that YX served pretty good French Toast on the breakfast runs.

French Toast, Omelettes, Quiche, Breakfast Sandwiches, and Skillet Breakfasts tend to be okay after re-heating. Pancakes -- not so much -- although I do recall that AS served some decent pancakes in Y back in the day (late-80's).