SWISS offers unsold food items at one third of the price

SWISS is trialling the possibility of offering its customers unsold food items at reduced prices on its services from Geneva, in collaboration with its partner “Too Good To Go”.

Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS) has long put a firm emphasis on environmental issues within its corporate culture, and takes sustainable actions at various levels to ensure the optimum use of resources in its business and operations. To the same ends, the company is seeking to reduce the volumes of fresh food items which remain unsold on its flights and must therefore be thrown away. SWISS already uses historical sales data for each flight to tailor its fresh product uplifts as closely as possible to likely passenger demand. But the company is now taking a further step in this direction, by teaming up with its partner “Too Good To Go” to offer at reduced prices any fresh food items which remain unsold. To test customer acceptance, a trial of the new approach is being conducted in August and September on the last flights of the day from Geneva on SWISS’s European network.

A simple procedure

The new concept consists in offering any fresh food items that remain unsold on certain services at the end of the flight concerned. These items’ availability is communicated via an inflight announcement, and interested passengers are offered a bag containing one, two or three such fresh food items at one third of their usual price. The bag’s contents are not revealed in advance, and remain a surprise for the purchaser.

The new approach is being trialled in collaboration with “Too Good To Go”, the world’s biggest app platform for connecting companies with users to reduce food waste. “Managing waste on board is an important part of our commitment to greater sustainability, “ stresses SWISS CCO Tamur Goudarzi Pour. “We hope to significantly reduce unused food on board our aircrafts by introducing this service. Thinking about sustainability in all our products, services and processes is part of our SWISS DNA.”

“The first results from these trials have been promising,” adds SWISS’s Head of Western Switzerland Romain Vetter. “The new approach has been well received by our passengers on the flights concerned. We’re now awaiting a final analysis of the trials’ findings to decide if we should extend it to further routes.”