Airline Catering Robot: Flight Kitchens and ABB

Every meal tray that reaches an airline seat was put together in a flight kitchen on the ground, and much of that assembly is still done by people. An airline catering robot has to cope with the things that kept older machines out of these kitchens: ingredients that never look quite the same, frequent changeovers and high-mix production. This post follows flight kitchens from the first airline meals in 1919 to the trays filled by hand at Copenhagen in the 1950s, then to the robotic wok paddles SATS added in Singapore and the Make & Pack workstation gategroup is developing with ABB Robotics, and ends with what comes next.

A deluxe meal tray prepared by DO & CO and sold for an extra fee in Austrian Airlines economy class, 2013. Photo: Austrian Airlines / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How flight kitchens filled trays by hand

The first airline meals were sandwiches and fruit, served by Handley Page Transport on its London to Paris route in October 1919. Hot food needed a kitchen on the ground. In the 1930s United Airlines set up the first dedicated in-flight catering kitchen, in Oakland, California, with a choice of scrambled eggs or fried chicken, and in 1942 American Airlines created Sky Chefs as its catering subsidiary. After the war William Maxson's frozen "sky plate" found its way to Pan Am, which began serving pre-made frozen meals. Airlines liked them because they cut food waste when a flight was cancelled.

Cooks at work in SAS's flight kitchen at Kastrup airport, Copenhagen, in the 1950s or 1960s. Photo: SAS Scandinavian Airlines via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

For decades flight kitchens ran on people. Photos from SAS's flight kitchen at Copenhagen's Kastrup airport in the 1950s and 1960s show cooks working beside long tables covered with trays, and women filling meal trays dish by dish. Demand kept rising, and by 1946 flight attendants had to serve twice as many passengers in two-thirds of the time. In 1966 Lufthansa created its own catering company, LSG Lufthansa Service. Swissair, founded in 1931, spun off its catering arm as Gategourmet in 1992, and by the end of the 1990s that company ran 70 airline kitchens in 23 countries with 14,000 employees.

Women filling meal trays by hand in SAS's flight kitchen at Kastrup airport, Copenhagen, 1950s or 1960s. Photo: SAS Scandinavian Airlines via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Machines arrived around the edges of the job first. A 2023 report in Onboard Hospitality listed what was already common in catering kitchens: automation for loading trays, packaging and logistics, auto-stirring kettles, depositors that dose food to a recipe and formatters that help with neat presentation. Singapore's SATS, set up in 1972 as a Singapore Airlines subsidiary, went further. By 2016 its Changi kitchens had automated guided vehicles, a flexible assembly line and an automated cutlery system that washes, polishes, sorts and packs cutlery. That year SATS announced an $18 million line with robotic wok paddles and automated sauce dispensers, able to mechanise up to half of some kitchen operations.

A Brahim's Airline Catering truck docking at a Lufthansa Airbus A340 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, 2015. Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robot woks, meal assembly robots and Make & Pack

The new SATS line raised capacity across its two inflight catering centres to about 115,000 meals a day. Its innovation team said woks with automated stirrers, controlled timing and steam jets cook fried rice and noodles more evenly. Other kitchens work at even larger scale: Emirates Flight Catering in Dubai employs over 11,000 people, and its main centre can produce more than 225,000 meals a day. New kitchens keep opening as well. On 7 October 2026 Navi Mumbai International Airport said its TajSATS flight kitchen already serves more than 40 departing flights a day, producing up to 7,500 meals daily with room to grow to 15,000.

Servair catering trucks resupplying an Etihad Airbus A380 at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, 2018. Photo: Guillaume de Syon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots are now moving into tray assembly itself. Chef Robotics, which builds AI-driven meal assembly robots, lists airline catering among its markets and says its robots can run 24/7, handle short runs and quick changeovers, and place food into particular compartments of a tray. It says older systems such as dispensers and vibratory feeders struggle with the natural variability of ingredients, frequent changeovers and high-mix production, which sounds a lot like a flight kitchen. The caterers are careful. In 2023 Oliver Fischer, gategroup's director of group culinary excellence, said there is always an urge to buy a robot to replace people, but inflight work brings its own challenges and any automated system has to be simple and very flexible.

Senior Airman Kamiah Johnston prepares meals in the Jawbone Flight Kitchen at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, March 2026. Four Airmen staff it around the clock in shifts. Photo: U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Jared Lovett (public domain)

ABB is already involved through gategroup. At the WTCE trade show in Hamburg in April 2026, gategroup presented a Make & Pack workstation prototype developed with ABB Robotics and Swiss Engineering Partners, a concept for airline catering that combines robotics with AI-powered vision and live operational insight. Gategroup, based in Zurich, has nearly 200 locations in more than 60 countries. ABB's existing food robots could take on much of the same work. The IRB 1200 Hygienic is built for wipe-down or wash-down cleaning and for food handling and assembly in high-volume central kitchens, and the IRB 360 FlexPicker delta robot picks and packs items of 1 to 8 kg at high speed.

An ABB YuMi cobot finishing a burger at BurgerBots in Los Gatos, California. Photo: ABB

Where flight kitchen robots go next

Turning prototypes like Make & Pack into lines that run every day is the next job. Fischer said gategroup had studied Toyota's Kaizen principles for fully automating meal production and tray setting, and that automation pays off in dishwashing, food preparation and logistics only when every base follows the same standard processes. Gategroup had 160 kitchens worldwide at the time. Its Apicbase tool already searches more than 1,000 recipes to build menus for an airline brief that meet allergen, labelling and nutrition rules. A robot cell fed with the same data could, in principle, switch from one airline's tray layout to the next.

An ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker stacking burger toppings at BurgerBots. Photo: ABB

The same machines are reaching food that people eat at home. Chef Robotics also sells its robots to makers of frozen and fresh ready meals and to meal delivery services, so the same kind of robot fills trays for meals that end up in home freezers and on doorsteps. Our post on meal kit robots covers that side. In factories and flight kitchens alike, a new cell is usually planned and tested on a computer before it is built. With ABB robots this is done in RobotStudio, ABB's simulation and offline programming software, which runs real robot programs on a virtual controller.

An engineer at an ABB FlexPicker cell. PickMaster Lite runs on ABB's OmniCore controller and links to RobotStudio. Photo: ABB

Flexibility is the hardest part. Schedules and menus change, and Fischer says kitchens must be able to amend operations quickly, something gategroup's staff are expert at doing by hand. Hygiene comes next. The TajSATS kitchen works to HACCP and ISO 22000, so any robot near open food has to be cleaned like the rest of the line, and ABB's IRB 1200 Hygienic comes in a wash-down version for such areas. On cost, the chef Marc Warde expects robots to spread in this sector as their price falls. People stay in the loop as supervisors: Fischer says staff now observe, intervene and manage the automated processes.

An economy meal with pasta, salad, humous and cake on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to London, 2012. Photo: joshuapiano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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