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Special Report


Deliverance!


Jeremy Clark gets re-educated about in-flight meals when he takes a stroll through DHL’s Heathrow facility


Ten years ago, if someone had suggested to you that your in-flight meal would be supplied by DHL your response may well have been: “Oh really? And I suppose I’ll be getting my car insured with Sainsbury’s and motorway food from Marks and Spencer”. Well, as it turns out, all happens to be true. But let’s not underestimate the true shift-change in traditions with the arrival of DHL into the airline catering market.


“BA, DHL and Northern Foods have between them proven that you don’t necessarily need to be a hatter to make a nice hat”


There are of course other less visible but equally


vital contributors to this model chiefly, Northern Foods who collaborate seamlessly with DHL to service this contract and lastly but by no means least, British Airways for having the foresight to think outside the meal box. This arrangement has been operational since March 2010 and long enough to see how well it’s going. When this arrangement first came to the fore,


I wrote light-heartedly speculating how this might work, envisaging yellow t-shirted couriers handing me a meal tray or finding a slip on my seat if I was away from it, informing me of “attempted delivery” and an invite to pick it up from my nearest DHL centre. I am delighted to report that both Chris Jackson,


DHL’s global vp of airline business solutions and Richard Wood, business sector director for Northern Foods decided I had this badly wrong. So they decided to educate me by inviting me and OnBoard Hospitality’s Sue Williams to their facility near Heathrow to experience first hand precisely how they are working. Let me begin by saying, they are working very


well indeed. Let’s be realistic, this is flight catering. A service that started ca.1922 with a sandwich and tea


42 www.onboardhospitality.com


uplifted to an Imperial Airways flight to Paris, and the concept of making stuff and loading it onto a flight hasn’t changed that much in the intervening years. The ownership of this service however has remained with the traditional specialised caterers. But now, BA, DHL and Northern Foods have between them proven that you don’t necessarily need to be a hatter to make a nice hat. What DHL and NF have is expertise in specific areas. They are the best at what they do. And the customer here (BA) has tasked them with applying these skills to a very individual service. How have they done this?


Well, the first impression when you arrive at the DHL Unit is that it doesn’t really look like a Flight Catering. And that’s because it isn’t. In fact before the renovation it was a freezer storage facility. However, once through the high levels of security, and into the unit you realise that it isn’t a traditional Flight Catering on the inside either. What it is, is a highly efficient and finely tuned logistics and tracking operation designed to minimise cost and waste whilst delivering error- free uplift and the highest quality of catering. Spencer Conday, DHL’s Heathrow Unit gm and a key contributor to the design and functionality of the unit took us around to see it all.


Straight away, we found ourselves at a part of


the operation I always like to see when touring units, namely the inbound de-catering and wash- up. This is a good place to start because if this area is spotless you can be sure the rest is too! Spencer told us, “Part of BA’s requirement for the contract is a zero-to-landfill commitment and we are well on the way to achieving this 100%”. All offloaded waste is recycled. Even food waste


goes into driers where 70% of the weight/volume is removed and you’re left with what looks like coffee grounds. These can be compressed to pellets and used to generate power at the next door facility. The main part of the building looks more like


a parcel sorting operation as carts are sorted, unloaded, loaded and tagged using what Spencer


described as “asset tagging”. Every single item that comes in, is moved around, and goes out is traceable through the systems. In total, DHL utilises 14 various IT solutions


to manage BA’s catering of up to 13 million meals annually from this unit. Data is sorted and processed through its main data centre in Prague. The resulting process is a blend of information which ensures no flight is left wanting and no item is left unaccounted for. Within the facility we find ourselves at the Northern Foods area which is an operation within an operation. After an impressive hygiene procedure more akin to a microbiological research lab, we enter the foody bit. Richard described the procedures and precision timing


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