For nearly two years, Lufthansa has offered its passengers on cross-border European flights lasting more than an hour a varied, high-quality range of fresh meals, packaged snacks and drinks for purchase. The fresh meals, such as salads, bowls and sandwiches, are prepared fresh daily by catering company Gate Gourmet according to recipes from dean&david at the Frankfurt and Munich locations. Cake specialties from Dallmayr are also offered. Because they are deliberately prepared without colorants or preservatives, they have a short shelf life and must be disposed of if they are not sold on the designated flights.

Now Lufthansa is launching the “Onboard Delights Last Minute” initiative: passengers have the opportunity to purchase fresh products that have not been sold by then shortly before landing on all flights to Frankfurt and Munich on which Onboard Delights are offered, at the lower price of a uniform 3.50 euros, and take them with them. This is a further step toward reducing food waste, after Lufthansa already introduced the option of pre-ordering these products in February of this year.

Another new feature of Lufthansa Onboard Delights is that award miles can be collected and redeemed when purchasing food and beverages from the Onboard Delights range. At least one award mile is credited per euro when the Miles & More card is presented.

Lufthansa Group catering concepts for less waste

Sustainability is one of the Lufthansa Group’s top priorities. On short-haul flights, the amount of food waste is to be reduced by 50 percent by 2025 compared to 2019. To achieve this, the Lufthansa Group is optimizing catering processes, offering passengers the opportunity to order meals in advance, and reducing the amount of products held in stock as standard. As a result, Lufthansa was already able to reduce the proportion of discarded perishable food by 45 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Austrian, SWISS and Eurowings have already been offering unsold food at reduced prices since 2022. As a result, about 80,000 food products were consumed in 2022 that would otherwise have been disposed of.