Prawns are out and chicken is in to cut airline meal costs

One of the world’s biggest airline caterers is swapping prawns for chicken on menus more regularly to help save costs as the aviation industry emerges from the Covid pandemic.

Singapore’s SATS Ltd., which provides an array of third-party services including catering to airlines, said prawns that used to be available on certain flights are sometimes being replaced by chicken as the meat is cheaper. 

Airlines sometimes “decide to reduce the protein amount just to maintain the price, or they look to substitute protein in terms of the meals,” SATS President and Chief Executive Officer Kerry Mok said in response to an analyst question during a webcast on the company’s fiscal third-quarter results this week. 

“If the prawns are too expensive we will change to chicken,” Mok said. 

SATS said Monday evening that its quarterly income shrank to S$0.5 million ($375,000) from S$5.1 million a year earlier. Its shares slid as much as 8% the following day, before closing down 4.7%, their biggest loss in three months. Still, the results were an improvement from the previous quarter, when the company posted a S$9.9 million loss. 

SATS served 49.1 million meals in the first nine months of fiscal 2023, an increase of 25% from a year earlier.

The global aviation sector is in rebuilding mode, rushing to bring back capacity and staff to cope with a resurgence in travel. The recovery has been staggered as countries reopened at different times, with China — one of the world’s biggest markets for air travel — only recently ending its strict Covid curbs. 

Airline industry losses are expected to total $6.9 billion in 2022, according to the International Air Transport Association, following losses of $42 billion in 2021 and $138 billion in 2020.