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This Airplane Food Is No Joke

Culinary excellence helps giant LSG Sky Chefs lure high-end fliers.
By Thomas Korosec |
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On an old, celebrity-filled Saturday Night Live skit, Jerry Seinfeld asked, “What’s the deal with airplane food?” Rob Schneider got an easy laugh with the reply: “I know. Could this stuff taste any worse?” Chimed in Adam Sandler: “Beef stroganoff? Isn’t that getting a little loose with the language?”


Comedians found themselves with one less source of reliable material when the airlines eliminated regular meal service in their coach sections during the industry’s steep downturn following the 9/11 terror attacks. But it’s hard to think that travelers missed much of the notoriously bland fare that traditionally was served in the skies, from overcooked vegetables to “mystery meat.”


Lately though, the airlines have been scuffling for high-margin first-class and business-class passengers. And one of the things they’re using to distinguish themselves at the front of the plane is food. As a result, it has fallen to LSG Sky Chefs—the global leader in airline catering—to bring airline meals into the era of celebrity chefs, foodie tastes, and fresh, locally sourced ingredients.


“What we are seeing is the expectation of culinary excellence, for real quality,” says Dennis Sadlowski, who was hired in May 2013 as regional chief operating officer for LSG’s Irving-based North American division. “Airlines are really competing aggressively for that high-end traveler, and we’ve become a key piece of their overall brand promise.”


The company has jumped on trends such as gluten-free meals and menus featuring locally sourced ingredients.

That Sky Chefs turned to Sadlowski, a nuclear engineer whose career experience runs more to power systems than portabello mushrooms, says a lot about the range of  management challenges involved in airline catering. 


“It’s a real right-brain, left-brain kind of business,” Sadlowski explains during an interview in his minimally decorated office. “On one hand, it’s about taste and creativity. On the other, we do 61 million meals a year, so there’s real logistics and left-brain organization involved. You have to synthesize both parts of that.”


Sadlowski, who leaves the cooking at home to his wife and admittedly had “zero experience” in food service before joining the company, instead brings management skills aimed at “getting results and consistency top to bottom through people.


“Our delivery model isn’t a high-automation business, and it’s not a high-technology business,”  he says. “Not to be trite about it, [but] it’s a people business.” In addition to bringing a detailed set of management principles—some centered on the management training he got early in his career at General Electric—he also was tapped as someone who could explore growth opportunities in what outwardly looks to be a mature business.


One possible avenue: lottery tickets. But more on that later.



•••



Halfway through 2014, Sadlowski’s customers in the airline business had seldom looked stronger. “In the last two years alone, the big three legacy carriers—American, United, and Delta—increased their market cap by $48 billion,” he says. “They’re all producing record profits, so we’re working with a healthy platform.” 


Of course it hasn’t always been flush times for the airlines, or the catering companies serving them. “We have a history of being a cost center. Over the years there has been a lot of pressure on costs throughout our customer base,” Sadlowski says. That pressure has often meant so-so food delivered with “a compliance level of performance.” His goals for the company today are more aligned around “excellence … lifting our culinary excellence and also our ability to deliver on-time, within all our customer metrics.”


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Founded by American Airlines in 1942, Sky Chefs was spun off in the mid-1980s. The German airline Lufthansa began acquiring parts of it in 1993, and it became a wholly owned subsidiary in 2001. Today the North American division of LSG Sky Chefs commands approximately 43 percent market share in its region, employing 9,000 people in 43 locations stretching from Miami and Anchorage to Boston and San Diego. About 260 people work at the North American headquarters in Irving. American Airlines, Virgin America, and Delta Airlines are among its largest customers.


At the front of the plane and on international flights, where full-service meals have survived, food has become one more way for airlines to distinguish themselves while providing what is essentially a commodity—a trip from point A to point B. 


Demand for fine food has been heightened further by the advent of the Food Channel, celebrity chefs, and an increased emphasis on fresh ingredients, Sadlowski says. As a result, Sky Chefs has hired certified executive chefs and design chefs and put about 20 current employees though outside training for advanced chef certifications.


For a recent leadership meeting, the company set up an Iron Chef-style competition in which it took five very common items in its kitchens—beef filet, Russet potatoes, carrots, eggs, and herbs—and five executive chefs demonstrated what they could do with those very limited items. The chefs came up with dishes such as julienned carrots, sesame beef filet and ginger spring roll, Southwest seasoned beef filet with potato rosti, chive and cheddar cheese frittata, and carrot vichyssoise. 


It was an example of  Sadlowski’s emphasis on learning and development as an essential part of his management philosophy. “We have to be open to what we have learned from ourselves and what we see in other industries,” he says. “If you’re not getting better, you’re probably losing ground.”


In Sadlowski’s view, industry leadership “isn’t one more dollar of market share or boarding one more meal. It’s asking, ‘Who does the market talk about? How do our customers talk about us?’ It’s clarifying to ask that—and inspiring. I want to motivate people to move in that direction.”



•••



Sky Chefs either designs menus from start to finish or, when airlines weigh in with their own menu items—often from celebrity chefs—the company brings them to fruition in the airline environment. “We can pretty much do anything,” says Bill Gillen, the region’s director of culinary excellence. 


Delta, for instance, features Napa Valley-based chef Michael Chiarello and his updated take on Southern Italian cuisine, Gillen says. “We have another customer that is doing smoked brisket, a taste-of-the-South approach,” he says. Yet another client, Virgin America, has won awards for dishes Sky Chefs has designed for the airline. Still another client is working on a regional approach. “When they’re flying out of the Southwest,” Gillen adds, “they want Southwest cuisine.”


International airlines flying out of the United States have Sky Chefs preparing geographic-specific signature dishes. For Korean Airlines, there’s bibimbap—a rice and vegetable dish—or beef bulgogi, in which the meat is marinated in soy sauce and other ingredients. Middle Eastern carriers such as Emirates get Halal-certified dishes, plus regional specialties such as baba ghanoush and hummus. Sky Chefs also offers kosher meals from outside providers.


In addition, the company has jumped on trends such as gluten-free meals and menus featuring locally sourced ingredients. “We’re working with vendors to get locally sourced meats and produce, within 100 miles, and that will be described on the menu,” Gillen says.


There are a host of tricks of the trade and food safety precautions that LSG Sky Chefs has learned over the years, some through scientific research on the effects of altitude and pressurized cabins. “At altitude, our taste buds are definitely less sensitive. They deaden a bit, so when you season your food you want to add a little more spice to get the flavor profiles we’re looking for,” Gillen says. 


For safety reasons, he adds, “You aren’t going to get a rare steak on an airplane. The best we can cook it to is medium.”


On the ground floor of Sky Chefs’ headquarters, there’s a spacious test kitchen and formal presentation room that functions as a stage for the company to showcase future offerings to its airline customers. One room is filled with china and flatware from the various airlines, so the presentations are as authentic as possible.


Typically between 100 and 150 items are presented in tasting sizes or, as Sadlowski puts it, “There’s food across the entire room. You could eat your way from morning to night.” For airlines that want to plan for the entire year, the tastings might go on for a week.


The test kitchen has equipment typically found in Sky Chefs kitchens, as well as the simple, three-setting ovens used for reheating on airliners. 


There also are presentation cases from Sky Chefs’ other sizable customer, 7-Eleven, and other convenience stores, for which the company makes fresh items such as sandwiches. The sandwiches are prepared daily “in the wee hours of the morning,” Sadlowski says. One of the more unusual challenges Sky Chefs has with convenience store customers is making the food look attractive under harsh fluorescent lights. “The light makes fresh ham look gray,” Gillen says. “You can put filters in the fixtures to fix that.”



•••



Menu preparation and food presentation aren’t the business issues the 53-year-old Sadlowski would have guessed he’d be addressing these days, given his training and career trajectory.


He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the son of German immigrants who met in the United States. Sadlowski was at the top of his class at Pacifica’s Terra Nova High School, where he was strong in science, math, and soccer.


He played varsity soccer at the University of California at Berkeley—a sport he has stayed with through most of his life. “It’s the ultimate team sport,” says Sadlowski, whose rangy frame matched his position as a central defender. “A good team can outdo superstars.”


Graduating with a dual degree in chemical and nuclear engineering, Sadlowski went to work at General Electric as an engineer and later a manager during the Jack Welch era. “I was there when a lot of his ideas were being put in place,” Sadlowski says of the former GE CEO. He said he has adopted Welch’s idea about “having clarity about what’s important to the business.”


In 2000, Sadlowski took a position as vice president of German-owned Siemens Energy & Automation Inc. Seven years later, at age 46, he was appointed president and CEO of the 12,000-employee, $4 billion unit, which produced products such as circuit breakers and large power distribution equipment. His first two years at the helm, 2007 and 2008, saw record profits. Then, in October 2008,  Sadlowski says, “the world stopped. Our order book went to nothing.”


A number of long-cycle contracts, such as supplying equipment for the Keystone XL pipeline, continued. But the unit cut its workforce by 20 percent, Sadlowski says, and focused on “growing market share, because real growth wasn’t going to be there.”


Tom Varney, a former Siemens vice president of corporate communications who worked with Sadlowski through those years, calls him a “brilliant guy, a brilliant mind. He comes across as a being a little introverted, but his brain is going a million miles an hour.”


As a general approach, Varney says, Sadlowski “got the whole organization focused on the customer. He’s all about accountability with customer results and developing people.” In management meetings Sadlowski could go toe to toe with the financial types as well as the engineers, says Varney. “He’s extremely strategic. He’d see through the clutter.”


In 2010, Siemens instituted a worldwide restructuring that ended the Atlanta-based energy unit’s status as a stand-alone business. “I was asked to stay and do other things. But at the time, it didn’t seem like the right path for me,” Sadlowski recalls. “I thought, what better time to try my luck in the start-up field?”


There was a lot of interest at the time in so-called green technology, and Sadlowski connected with a high-energy battery startup with private equity backing. “It should have been venture-backed, because it was a good product, but it still needed some work,” he says. The investors, spooked a bit by the failure of federally backed Solyndra, which was building solar cells, decided it wasn’t the right field for them and pulled the plug.


Sadlowski was working with some other private equity groups when Sky Chefs approached him through an executive recruiter. “I had zero experience in the food production world, but they said that wasn’t what they were looking for,” he says. “We hit it off exceptionally well.” 


Sadlowski speaks German, spent three years at Siemens’ headquarters in Germany, and remains in good standing with the company—all of which probably helped him secure the position at Sky Chefs, he says. So, he made the 11th physical move of his career, from Atlanta to Dallas, with his wife and three children—twin sons age 16 and a daughter, 15, all now in local private schools. The family recently bought a house in University Park.


“I like Dallas. So far so good,” Sadlowski says of his new home. Not that he sees a lot of it with all the travel the job entails. During his first 90 days last year, Sadlowski visited 15 Sky Chefs locations and made two trips to Germany.


When he’s doing the hosting, a “steak place” is usually on the agenda. That might be Bob’s Steak and Chop House or Pappas Bros. Steakhouse. “The list goes on,” he says. “Out-of-town visitors from Europe and every place else, when they come to Texas, they love to have a big hunk of beef.”



•••



Beyond working to elevate Sky Chefs meals for airlines’ premium passengers, Sadlowski says he’s focused now on new products and services. “We think where the next wave is going is more food for sale and not integrated into the ticket price,” he says. Today that means little snack boxes of packaged foods, such as Delta’s “Travel Treats”—jerky, chips, cookies, and a couple of other items that are supplied by a Sky Chefs subsidiary.


“Just like every seat has a video screen, every seat will have the opportunity to make some kind of purchase,” he says. “In Europe you have seen this with the low-cost carriers. They are thinking, ‘We have a captive potential customer. Let’s figure out what they want. It may be food. It may be scratch-off lottery tickets.’”


Although Sadlowski does not foresee full meals returning to coach, he does expect more fresh and packaged items to find their way to coach-class passengers. That would be very good for LSG Sky Chefs, which supplies them both. 


And that’s no joke.  

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