Flight meals sold at store to save jobs

Helsinki - Finnair said on Tuesday it would cut around 700 jobs by March 2021.

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 with 1,600 meals sold within days at the supermarket located near Finnair’s main hub the Helsinki-Vantaa airport, Finnair said. 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 said.

Finnair said on Tuesday it would cut around 700 jobs by March 2021.

Finnair Kitchen’s first main courses on the ground, for €12.9 ($15.2) apiece, comprise beef with teriyaki-radish sauce served with grilled spring onion and rice or smoked arctic char with chantarelle risotto. “In this desperate remote work environment this is a small, nice taste of normal life,” Mika, a customer from Vantaa said.

In 2017, Finnair 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.

• Food and Dining