Miss airline food? Finnair sells business class meals in a supermarket – and sales have taken off
- Around 1,600 of the business class meals have been sold within days
- They can be purchased at a supermarket close to Helsinki Airport
- Meals include a blue cheese mousse starter and a beef teriyaki main course
Finland’s national carrier, Finnair, has started selling its business class meals in a supermarket to prevent job cuts at its catering unit due to Covid-19.
The airplane meals have quickly turned into a hit, Finnair said, with 1,600 meals sold within days at the supermarket, which is located near Finnair’s main hub – Helsinki Airport. It plans to sell in more outlets.
‘There are redundancies and layoffs going on already at Finnair and we are trying our best to find new innovative ways,’ head of Finnair Kitchen Marika Nieminen told Reuters.
Finnair has started selling its business class meals in a supermarket to prevent job cuts at its catering unit due to Covid-19. Pictured is the carrot and cheese mousse starter (€5.90) and smoked char main €12.90
The meals are currently being sold at the K-Citymarket Tammisto in the city of Vantaa.
For €5.90 (£5.36/$6.97) customers can buy the roasted carrot and blue cheese mousse with hazelnuts starter.
There are two main dishes on offer, a smoked char with chanterelle risotto and beef with teriyaki-radish sauce, spring onion and rice. Both are €12.90 (£11.71/$15.24).
The two main course options are available throughout the week from Monday to Sunday, with the appetiser available from Friday to Sunday. The menu will change every two weeks.
‘We have had very much positive feedback from our customers and this product has become one of the best-selling products in our store,’ Kimmo Sivonen, a shopkeeper at the supermarket said.
While Mika, a customer at the store, added: ‘In this desperate remote work environment this is a small, nice taste of normal life.’
Finnair says it plans to introduce new dishes, including reindeer meat from Finnish Lapland and Japanese-style pork shoulder, for supermarkets.
Finnair Kitchen head of product development, Juha Stenholm, said the food’s high quality justified the relatively high price for a packed takeaway meal.
Finnair, Finland’s national carrier, said last Tuesday it would cut around 700 jobs by March 2021
‘Our unit is focusing on business class food so … premium raw materials,’ he said.
In 2017, the airline stopped outsourcing its catering services by buying LSG Sky Chefs, a company that operated at Finland’s main airport, from a Lufthansa subsidiary and renamed it Finnair Kitchen.
A year later, Finnair Kitchen produced some 12,000 meals a day, but the numbers collapsed when the Covid-19 pandemic hit air travel.
Finnair said last Tuesday it would cut around 700 jobs by March 2021.
