Fifteen million croissants, 13.3 million eggs, and 4,320 tons of chicken are prepared each year at the Emirates Flight Catering Facility in Dubai. The EKFC, actually two distinct facilities; one for home team Emirates, and one catering to the needs of carriers like Singapore Airlines, Air France, SWISS and Virgin Atlantic is the largest, and most technologically advanced meal preparation facility in the world.
It takes 10,000 employees to operate the facility, preparing dishes for an average of 481 flights each day. That boils down to about 119,000 economy meals, 19,000 business class meals and 2,500 first class meals on any given day, according to The Daily Mail. The EKFC is wonderfully transparent with much of its food sourcing data, and that difference between economy and first class is apparent in its annual ordering numbers. The aforementioned 4,320 tons of chicken are presumably meant for economy, while the 3.6 tons of lobster prepared each year are offered to passengers in pricier seats. The 22 tons of kiwi or 260,000 liters of whipping cream the facility puts out are anyone’s guess.
The sheer scale of the EKFC’s figures aren’t only seen in enormous quantities of food. Serving more than 100,000 meals a day also requires impressive numbers of hygienic and food safety items — like, say, 23 million gloves or 4 million hairnets used each year. Three million dirty items must be cleaned and sorted every single day in order to keep operations humming along smoothly. Almost 2,000 tons of recycling are processed at the facility each year.
Photo: Emirates
Senior vice president of Emirates Flight Catering Joost Heymeijer aims to keep meals — and the curated wine list — as regionally appropriate and route specific as possible. Heymeijer tells CNN:
“Everyone has an opinion and food is emotional. It’s where you come from and go to — and also reminds you of where you’ve been. For example, for South Asia alone we fly to eight cities in India, each with different flavor profiles and dishes, before you look at Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.”
And speaking of wine, Emirates pairs all of those meals with bottles from the mouthwatering $500 Million cellaring effort it announced last year. More than a million bottles are currently aging in the airline’s enormous cellar in France’s Burgundy region. Where else would one build a half-billion dollar wine cellar, really?
Meals prepared at the EKFC are served to guests with the utmost expediency, and foods, whether lamb or fresh melon, are never served past 72 hours post-preparation. While Emirates’ largest catering facility certainly isn’t the only operation of its kind in the world — the airline operates another 22 in Asia alone — the sheer enormity of the facility, and the surprising number of other airlines catered by the EKFC mean that you very well may have at some point noshed on a dish prepared here in Dubai.