A Million Crisps and 50,000 Bars of Chocolate for Emirates Customers in 2019

The past year has seen award-winning airline, Emirates increase its affiliation with Irish suppliers by adding much-loved brands; Butlers, Keogh’s and Jameson to its supplier portfolio, offering First and Business Class customers a taste of Ireland at 40,000ft

Earlier this year, Emirates announced its partnership with north Dublin crisp company, ‘Keogh’s’ as part of a multi-million Euro project, which saw Keogh’s expand its production line to keep up with the demand of serving an estimated one million packs of crisps, each year, to Emirates customers. An Irish favourite, Keogh’s were selected by Emirates following a blind tasting of 15 brands of crisps.

While a range of great flavours can be enjoyed on board, for the season that’s in it, Keogh’s has developed a Christmas special, Turkey and Stuffing, for passengers flying during the festive season. To account for flying conditions, such as cabin pressure and altitude, which can affect taste buds, special compact 25g packets were created and are now served exclusively across First Class cabins all over the world.

Meanwhile, one of Ireland’s favourite chocolate brands, Butlers is the latest Irish brand to have secured a global contract with Emirates. The new deal sees an estimated 50,000 Butlers luxury chocolate bars taking their place in First Class cabin’s goodie baskets at 40,000 feet, each month.

The airline selected a variety of flavours from the Butlers signature solid chocolate bar collection, including Mixed Berries white chocolate and Honeycomb Crisp milk chocolate.

Commenting on the airlines partnering with multiple Irish brands in recent months, Enda Corneille, country manager for Emirates in Ireland said: “Product quality, excellent sustainability credentials, and of course, great taste are all factors we look for when working with suppliers. The Irish brands that we now work with fulfilled all of those factors and the reason they were picked wasn’t because of their Irish credentials, but because they were the very best in their field and stood out from big players for the high artisan quality products in which they produce across the Irish landscape.”

“Obviously Ireland is a very important market to Emirates, and being the Irish country manager makes it that bit more special for me to see iconic and worthy Irish brands come on board the Emirates family in recent times, and indeed in such a short period of time.”

Emirates operates the world’s biggest kitchen at 40,000 ft. catering for more than 155 million guests each year, selecting only the very best of produce to serve across all cabin classes.  This no easy task but no one understands global culinary trends better than Emirates as it serves destination-inspired cuisine onboard catering for up to 590 flights per day.

With over 12,450 recipes available to the catering team, Emirates changes its menu every month to ensure there’s always plenty of choice and variety for passengers, especially frequent flyers. A large scale operation, this means 1,200 chefs work around the clock to serve over 150 million meals with the same attention to detail in First, Business and Economy Class.

To bring it all together, it takes three million eggs, 70 tonnes of strawberries, 58 million bread rolls, 110,000kg of hummus and 165 tonnes of salmon fillet to feed Emirates customers each year, served by 23,000 Emirates cabin crew.

A global airline connecting global passengers, Emirates’ menu caters for a diverse range of tastes and special dietary requirements. The Emirates range of special meals provides for babies, diabetics, gluten-intolerant, Indian vegetarian, low-calorie and low-cholesterol, vegetarian oriental, kosher, Hindu, high fibre and everything in between.

Over the past decade, Emirates has invested more than US$690 million (€618 million) on wines, some of which will only be ready for drinking in 2025. With its own wine cellar in Burgundy, France, the Emirates cellar is the largest of any airline and currently stores 2.2 million bottles of vintage wines.

Bringing the very finest wine selection to passengers is no easy task, Enda Corneille explains: “Very few wine producers can meet Emirates’ demand for wines of a very high quality so the buying strategy is to focus on quality and buy in smaller parcels direct from the vineyards and producers, when necessary.  Whilst  it is logistically challenging to serve the 70 different labels available on any given day across the network, it does mean that customers, particularly the airline’s frequent flyers, can always look forward to something new and exciting.”

By 2020 Emirates expects to serve more than 23 million bottles on board its global flights, every year.  This projection includes 1.8 million bottles served in First Class and Business Class and 21.3 million single-serve bottles in Economy Class.  51.5 per cent of Emirates’ wines and Champagnes are consumed in Economy Class, 41.5 per cent in Business Class and seven per cent are consumed by First Class customers.  Emirates’ Cabin Crew are trained in wine appreciation and serving, with additional training provided for crew in First Class and Business Class.

Emirates is also one of Dom Pérignon’s largest global partner and the airline has access to exclusive vintages for customers in First Class such as Dom Pérignon Vintage 2005 and the Dom Pérignon Vintage Rosé 2003. Emirates also stocks more than 40 premium spirits and serves a selection of cocktails including Espresso Martini, Manhattan, Rob Roy and Kir Royale.

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