Eurowings Serves Expired Food In Business Class

This is an airline negative story unrelated to Southwest Airlines. I think this is a nice change of pace this week…

Eurowings serves expired food

OMAAT Leader Adrian boarded Eurowings flight 7406 from Hamburg (HAM) to Paris (CDG) today. For those unfamiliar, Eurowings is Lufthansa’s local low-cost carrier subsidiary. He was flying in BIZclass, the name of Eurowings’ premium cabin.

One of the main benefits of flying BIZclass is the free meal, but we may not have had as many perks today. The in-flight meal on this flight was a box of tapas meat platters. After eating most of his meal, he looked more carefully at the box.

The food was 18 days past its “best before” date — the date listed was December 11th and the flight was on December 29th.

Kind. It’s nice to eat yogurt and pretzels that are a few days past their expiration date, but I don’t want meat this expired.

Sure, Eurowings’ in-flight magazine talks about reducing food waste, but serving food 18 days past its ‘best before’ date is probably not ideal. 😉

How could this happen?

It’s a bit of a shock to serve a meal well past the intended date. I understand that packaged snacks may be used for multiple flights, but sometimes the dates aren’t checked. I have. But when we’re talking about meat platters, you’d think we’d be a little more conscious of shelf life.

How exactly did this happen? Was this catered to multiple flights, not consumed and ended up at the catering facility? Was it done?

I don’t recall ever seeing an expiration date on the food we consume on board, but perhaps the time has come.

I think this is pretty amazing, but at the same time, I always want to stress that airline operations are ridiculously complex. It takes a lot to keep an airline running smoothly, and there are countless moving parts. Given the complexities involved, aviation is one of the best-run industries in the world (broadly speaking, there are obvious exceptions). As with any industry, it’s no wonder things can go wrong at times.

Conclusion

An OMAAT leader was flying Eurowings BIZclass and was served an expired meal. The meal he was supposed to have consumed by December 11th was still served on the December 29th flight. This is pretty bad.

What are your thoughts on this expired meal and how do you think it came about?