Airlines

Airlines Hope Algorithms Can Finally Fix Their Drink Carts

Brian Sumers

Photo Credit: JetBlue Airways may carry about to 1,000 drinks on its A321 aircraft so it can satisfy passengers in both directions on a transcontinental flight.  JetBlue

Skift Take

Passengers sitting in the back of the airplane hate it when an airline runs out of food for sale. But airlines also hate waste, and they usually must throw out uneaten fresh food the same day. How do airlines decide how much food and drink to board? It's a delicate dance.

When passengers reach their seats on EasyJet, they may find a multi-page menu, with several food options, including a sweet chili chicken wrap, a mezze snack box, and a mini-calzone. At £4.50 per item, or almost $6 per dish, they should be money-makers. But until recently, EasyJet had a problem: It couldn’t predict what passengers would want. And because fresh food generally has a shelf life of one day or less — after that, carriers toss it for safety reasons— this was expensive.

So EasyJet, among the only airlines with a chief data scientist, asked one of its number-crunchers to examine what items sold on what routes. Within four days, the airline learned demand for many items was far different on a 6 a.m. flight to Edinburgh than on a Friday night flight to Ibiza. But because it was stocking the wrong items on many routes, it calculated it was throwing away three fresh food items after each flight.

Multiply that by every EasyJet departure