In Person
Noon Air Kitchen doubles up
Noon Air Kitchen will this summer open its extended unit near Heathrow, more than doubling current capacity for Indian and other specialities. Patrick Murray meets its founder
Having come to England as a young man 45 years ago to open one confectionery shop in Southall and ending up as a member of the House of Lords,
you might expect that Gulam, now The Lord Noon MBE, would be taking it easy. Still only in his mid-seventies, not a bit of it. “Why should I retire?” he asks. “I am enjoying
it; I might have slowed down a bit, but stop, never.” With a string of successful business ventures under his belt, he is now overseeing major expansion of his Noon Air Kitchen in Southall in West London, first opened in 2004. The premises for the new unit were acquired three years ago and production will be almost entirely for aviation and travel catering. When the extension is ready this summer capacity will have more than doubled to 20,000 meals a day – good news for airlines at Heathrow and across the UK that want to give their passengers what Lord Noon and his team say is the best Indian food they can buy. It can be ordered ready to go, or developed with customer airlines to their specific demands. “And we don’t stop at Indian food,” he
is keen to emphasise. The unit can also a produce a range of starters, desserts and non- Indian entrees in most culinary styles, and halal. There are also chutneys and pickles, breads, dips, savoury mixes, salads and traditional kulfi: denser and creamier than ice cream and quite delicious. Customers already include British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher and Turkmenistan Airlines. The food is delivered daily freshly chilled to the airlines’ various handlers at the airport packed in the carrier’s own equipment that is also handled at the unit. It can also be supplied frozen. A native of Bombay, the young Gulam Noon
came to the UK in 1966, to start Bombay Halwa. “Speciality confectionery had been in the family for nearly 400 years and I promised
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www.onboardhospitality.com
my mother that if I did go to the UK I would only work for myself. We had already been exporting to the UK and we eventually decided we needed to get directly into the market.” He also invented the term Bombay Mix, now a generic term for that famous Indian snack.
Heathrow unit
chairman and ambassador for the company. There are now four plants producing 450,000 meals a day. He has been involved with airlines since way
back. “In the late 70s we were approached by British Airways to make meals for them, then Air Canada came so we supplied their flights to Bombay,” he says. “We can do menus for all classes of travel, and our food also used to be served on Concorde.” “I still believe that food on board is one of
In the late 80s Lord Noon saw that Indian
food was popular in supermarkets, but it was not the real thing; it was insipid and badly packaged. From that realisation, Noon Products just grew and grew. He subsequently sold the company and today it is owned by Kerry Foods, with Lord Noon remaining as
the most important ways in which airlines are perceived. Just as people that have been at an Indian wedding will ask each other how the food was, so this is one of the first questions passengers ask of each other. We are married to authenticity and natural
food, so our meals are entirely natural and as if home-cooked. It is proper Indian food,” Lord Noon concludes proudly. And the new expansion plans make it clear he believes it has a big future in travel catering.
www.bombayhalwa.com
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