Plane-is-home

Bonehead

Dr. Gabe Mirkin on Health, Fitness and Nutrition. | Cheese and Yogurt are OK, but Milk is Associated with a Higher Death Rate

​​​​​​​There is now some thought the the "French Paradox" may be related to cheese consumption rather than to the drinking of red wine.

halls120

I would agree, but then I remember how long UA has been using paper cups for ice cream in Polaris business/first, which makes me think UA just doesn't want to spend the money to fix things sooner.

N104UA

It isn't as simple as just calling up SkyChefs and asking for 3,000+ first class meals a day (as many flights are catered round trip), the amount of logistics in that would take months to move the operation over. Unfortunately I haven't seen an official statement from UA stating when they think it will be resolved.

transportprof

I was not suggesting that the F meals go into working galley space on UA's current flights to DEN. As has been pointed out, there are other places to put the meals - i.e., belly cargo. Or they could have called upon FedEx!

I may not be an expert on logistics, but I am willing to bet that if the people in charge of feeding F pax out of DEN had been responsible for re-supplying Berlin in 1961, then Russian would be the official language in that city today!

N104UA

Because there is a obviously a direct comparison of letting a city of 1,000,000+ starve due to a Soviet blockade and you getting a warmed up pizza instead of hosin chicken with BBQ sauce on your flight from DEN-BOS.

Kacee

Sorry, "let's just serve them BoB from Y and hope they don't notice" is not IMO an acceptable resolution. UA publishes meal standards. They should either meet those standards, or be up front about the fact there is a temporary suspension due to unforeseen circumstances. A little humility goes a long way.

One of the reasons this really grates is it feels like another of the stealth downgrades we've experienced all too many times since 2012.

Two Bee

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”—“Let them eat cake.”

minnyfly

I think a lot of people need to take a look at how meals come to be.

Knowledge about the logistics of providing meals is clearly lacking in this thread.

I would want it. I care more about what tastes good over what it looks like or how "balanced" it is. I'd take that meal even over some business meals I've had.

Easy. The logistics of that are essentially impossible (you need to be able to sufficiently increase capacity elsewhere in a brief amount of time, need a way to transport it, and need to do that transporting within hours of production), and even if possible would cost an insane amount of money.

Definitely not the ultimate reason.

No, it was the only realistic solution to provide food on the plane. Like I've said all along, it doesn't excuse the lack of communication, but it's almost certainly one of, if not the, only solutions UA had at their disposal to provide some measure of a "normal" meal.

It's easily justified that "normal" meal service hasn't been fully restored. It's not a matter of effort. It's a matter of what's possible and what isn't with that effort.

Plane-is-home

lupine

Proactively given first class customers notice and a $20 gift card to buy whatever they'd like to bring on board in the terminal would be a win.

And even if you're going to use pre-packaged food, would it kill them to buy the real cheese rather than "cheese food"? Boar's Head has some decent packaged stuff.

minnyfly

A. You honestly think a facility can expand physical space, acquire equipment, hire workers, and/or source materials in a matter of weeks and provide it at a reasonable cost? I don't think you saw the link I referred to.
B. "Used to". All we need to know to see this is all pure speculation and not common sense or reason. It goes back to point A. Do you think they've had have the physical facility to do it, had everything at the ready in the three years since they lost UA, and would be able to ramp things up on very short notice? Keep in mind your "solution" was accused last summer of not even paying minimum wage.
C. Tells us what? What does that have to do with the logistics of producing meals?

Finally, we're dealing with health inspectors here. It's very reasonable to assume that airlines expect things to be back up and running in X timeframe, but in reality that timeframe is at the mercy of the officials. They can and will make life difficult. That's an unknown element that doesn't allow us to know anything definitive.

halls120

In a matter of weeks? No. But at this point - months, not weeks - UA could likely have found a new supplier - if they were willing to spend the money. Clearly, they aren't.

LOL, restaurants in the DC area get closed all the time by health inspectors for sanitary violations. See how fast they reopen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...=.832d87e7530e

Darlox

I've avoided commenting in this thread to-date, because I so rarely fly in/out of DEN that I couldn't contribute much.

... but what I can contribute is that my company works with food manufacturers, including plenty of private label manufacturers. The interesting thing, for me, is that the catering facility affected didn't just service United. It also made prepared foods for King Soopers, one of the big grocery stores in the Rockies. After a recall and short-term outage, I've seen no indication that King Soopers has been significantly affected. Which means they switched suppliers, or brought in product from out-of-market.

While airline catering is definitely different than grocery store prep and private label manufacturing, the reality is that it's not THAT different. It's primarily packaging and storage that is different. And there are literally dozens of contract manufacturers (co-packers) in the Denver area, and throughout the Rockies. So concerns about the facility aside, switching manufacturers shouldn't be that hard. But co-packers do charge start-up fees and other packaging-related costs when they need to re-tool a production line to meet a new customer's requirements. Those charges can be significant.

So my guess, after all this time, is that someone at UA made the decision that they didn't want to pay those fees, likely believing that this was a short-term disruption. They didn't believe they'd be able to recoup the start-up costs before their original facility re-opened. The problem with that line of thinking is that it becomes self-perpetuating... short delays turn into long ones, but the vendor keeps telling you about the progress they've made, so the longer you wait, the less likely it _seems_ that you'll ever recoup your investment to temporarily change suppliers.

I've seen this in packaged goods manufacturing a LOT. The inevitable outcome there is that you lose distribution, as retailers get fed-up with the supply disruption and replace your product on the shelf with someone else's. There's another area where airline catering is different - it's unlikely that people will (in any significant number) "vote with their wallets" because of this kind of supply disruption.

But it's another indication of management thinking here. They're a transportation company, for pete's sake... I wouldn't at ALL be surprised to discover that King Soopers' production issues were resolved, at least in part, by transporting some other Kroger-affiliated producer's product to Denver, on UA aircraft!! The fact that UA hasn't come up with a solution, while other customers have, tends to indicate that they're squeezing those pennies until old Abe Lincoln screams...

Two Bee

never mind