“Wow! You finished all your food. Well done, little handsome,” a stewardess said to a little boy on flight MU5427 of China Eastern Airlines (China Eastern) on August 18. The praise aroused a round of warm applause from passengers around them.

The occasion described above was actually a common scene on flights of China Eastern since the company actively joined the nationwide “Clear Your Plate” initiative 2.0 against food waste in China with actual practice.    

China Eastern has asked flight attendants to verbally remind passengers to not waste food and take only what they need, and added labels with the words “‘Clear Your Plate’ initiative” onto the packages of in-flight meals.

Besides in-flight friendly reminders of the initiative, China Eastern has also put up eye-catching signboards bearing slogans such as “Take as much as you need, and say ‘no’ to food wastage”, as well as “Strictly practice thrift and oppose waste” in its VIP rooms at airports across the country.

Moreover, the company has taken advantage of big data in in-flight meal preparation and established an effective food preparation scheme as part of the efforts to curb food wastage.

Unlike the situation a few years ago when manual calculation would always cause unnecessary wastage of food materials during the production of airline meals, all the food materials needed for in-flight meals today are carefully prepared based on accurate estimation with the help of a sophisticated system driven by big data analytics tools.

The system can save about 100 kg to 150 kg of food materials on a daily basis for the in-flight meal processing workshop of China Eastern in Shanghai alone, according to relevant statistics.

Meanwhile, China Eastern has ended its old practice of determining the amount of food to be prepared for a flight according to the maximum number of passengers on board, and started to prepare food flexibly based on the actual number of passengers on the flight.

In order to make sure the amount of food prepared for each flight is reasonable, China Eastern’s catering staff now pay close attention to flight information and changes in passengers’ seats in a real-time manner through the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system of the company, and adjust the amount of food for flights timely before delivery.  

Recently, China Eastern launched an innovative “souvenir-like” snack for long-haul flights which are not during breakfast or dinner time, substituting home-made exquisite cakes, bread, fruit and desserts kept in lunch boxes or bags for the previous airline snacks, so that passengers can take the snacks away if they could not finish them on the plane.

Company: China Eastern Airlines

Website: http://www.ceair.com/

Contact: Liu Jianhao

TEL: (0086-21) 95530

Email: zhangyun3@ceair.com