There’s nothing quite like eating a warm, hearty casserole or enjoying a piping hot cup of tea when everybody’s wearing shorts and t-shirts. What about having a nice spring salad with fresh fruit while it’s snowing? It might sound odd to most, but that’s exactly the sort of thing that you’ll find our expert, innovative Products team doing at Retail inMotion.
In order to prepare for our customers’ winter and summer menu changes, we usually start a full 9 months ahead of the menu cycle. Why is that? Well, a new menu means a ton of prep work for more than just the Products team at Retail inMotion. After new seasonal items are presented to our airline customers and the final products are selected, our team still has a long road ahead of us to secure contracts, design menus and catalogues and train crew members before the items are ready to fly.
Most airlines keep their core products (think coffee, soft drinks and snacks like Boxerchips) all year round. However, the menus are often tweaked to appeal specifically to seasonal tastes of passengers. We keep an eye on trends all year round so we can recommend trendy, well known and popular seasonal dishes for our customers’ onboard retail programs.
In practice, that means that we recommend more robust, satisfying meals for winter menus and more light and airy flavours for summer. Sometimes that could be swapping a heavier snack out for something lighter. Other times, it could mean that we introduce a special edition, seasonal flavour of a product that’s already flying on board. Our Products team love when they are able match up-and-coming market trends they have identified with great tasting, seasonal dishes that passengers are excited about and want to buy when they travel!
Retail inMotion’s vision is always to create an exciting, efficient, and smooth onboard retail experience for our customers and their passengers. When it comes to products, it’s all doing the legwork needed to get the right products on board at the right time when you fly. That’s exactly why at Hangar57, you’ll find us listening to Jingle Bells and sampling eggnog in July!
