00:00It's not your average kitchen. With around 450 chefs preparing meals for over 1,500 different
00:13menus, the Emirates Flight Catering Facility in Dubai is the largest of its kind in the
00:18world in terms of volume throughput, with the design capacity for 130,000 meal trays
00:23per day.
00:26This facility, EKFC1, opened seven years ago. We're currently doing 125,000 meals per day
00:31for Emirates Airline. First, we plan out our menus that we'll run for the year. Our central
00:36purchasing department procures all of our produce. We bring it into the facility where
00:40it's prepped, prepared, cooked, blast chilled, and then dished into the airline casseroles.
00:46We bring in our foodstuffs from all around the world. Our beef is from the U.S., our
00:51salmon is from Norway, lamb from Australia, fresh produce from all across Europe, your
00:57fruits and vegetables. We source it wherever we can find the right quality. In our kitchens,
01:02we have chefs from 43 different nationalities. This ranges from everywhere. America, Switzerland,
01:09Canada, India, Pakistan, Philippines, China, Japan, Nepal, Myanmar. A large variety of
01:16chefs here. Because we produce so many different types of regional food, so we need chefs from
01:20each of the origins of our regions. Our catering facility is all latest high-tech kitchen
01:26solutions. From our cooking of rat pans or ovens or roasting, all of our chillers operate
01:32on a saltwater brine system rather than your normal average condensers, which is softer
01:38on the food but maintains temperature very well. We have separate kitchens, as you'll
01:43see when you go around. We have a kitchen for all our special meals, which are dietetic
01:48or religious backgrounds. This is the cold kitchen area. We're producing all our appetizers,
01:52salads, sandwiches, and fruits from this section. There's about 100 staff working here 24-7.
01:59So here, they're putting together the Arabic mezza for business class for all of tonight's
02:04flights going out to Europe. Right here in the cold kitchen, they're putting together
02:07the cold-cut plates for breakfast service. This area of the hot kitchen is cooking for
02:13the subcontinent, so that's about it. The shrimps you saw before is for the prawn biryani.
02:21The pastry and bakery cooking area. We make all our own Arabic sweets in-house. Fadi loves
02:28that. All the baking ovens, the meringues we make. Basically, we do everything except
02:36Arabic bread. This is the bakery area. Basically, right here, they're making chocolate chip
02:41muffins, and in the back, he's making the mixture for cheesecake. As soon as the trolleys
02:48are received from the aircraft at the uploading bay, they are segregated into food, beverages,
02:53duty-free trolleys, and dirty equipment. An electric monorail system transports 7,500
03:02millicarts per day. The monorail is a system that we have at EKFC that's basically used
03:13to transport pallets from the ground floor to the first floor automatically. The monorail
03:24system is also used to transport airline carts from the warewash to the warewashing lines for
03:33the carts to then be stripped. The carts are then sent to the mezzanine floor, where they
03:40go through an industrial cart washing machine. In the warewash, over 2 million items such as
03:48cutlery and glassware are washed and sanitized in a series of specially designed machines.
03:53The machine behind us is the economy warewashing line made by Hobart. This machine is basically
04:02designed to wash the in-bay tray sets, and the machine can wash roughly 1,200 trays per hour.
04:10Now, we have 10 of these machines all running at the same time, and that gives us an overall
04:19warewash capacity of 170,000 trays per day. Okay, this is the MS Airline high bay store.
04:29Within the store, there is roughly 24 hours worth of stock, which is replenished several times a
04:40day. If we have any shortfalls in the working floor to the equipment or consumable items,
04:46we basically take the items from the high bay store, we process them through the operation
04:52and production department, and then the stock gets replenished by an off-site store. This
04:58happens 24-7. This chiller is operating in the region of 2 to 3 degrees. The reason why it's 2
05:07to 3 degrees, we have to make sure when this flight is dispatched from this chiller and it's
05:15loaded into the high loader, the food has to be below 8 degrees. And the reason why we have very,
05:24very strict temperature guidelines or systems in place is when this food is served to the
05:33passenger on board, the food has not been subjected to any temperature abuse, so when
05:40the passenger gets the food in front of them, the salads are fresh, the hors d'oeuvres are fresh,
05:47the sweets are fresh. What you see behind me is the business class high loader being loaded with
05:58the business class items. All the items will get loaded into the truck, all the non-food items.
06:05Once all the non-food items have been loaded, the food items will then be taken out of the
06:11chiller. They'll be put into the truck. The items will then be secured in place by a strap. Once
06:21that happens, the shutter door will be closed and the vehicle will then be dispatched to the aircraft
06:25two hours before departure. Meal carts are later on transported by van to the aircraft, satisfying
06:33the sky-high appetites of passengers across the globe. Natalie Long for Golf News.
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