Improving the safety and quality of inflight food together
Safety and quality are not optional
In the airline business, the safety of passengers and crew is an absolute must. That applies to every aspect of airline travel, including food. Are you confident that the food you are serving is prepared according to methods that protect the health and safety of your passengers and crew?
With fierce competition in the airline industry, passengers’ satisfaction with inflight food can greatly affect your brand. Are you confident that your airline’s caterers are operating their facilities effectively so that your airline’s inflight food meets your quality expectations?
The problem is that the industry uses multiple standards and audit methodologies. That makes it costly and difficult to monitor the safety and quality of food being served.
The ICQA programme
IATA's Catering Quality Assurance programme (ICQA) takes a fresh approach to food safety and quality. It was designed to regularly assess and encourage caterers' compliance with food processing safety and quality standards set by airlines. Auditing is done more frequently, through a third-party, Medina Quality Assurance Services, a company that has conducted over 11,000 audits worldwide on behalf of airlines.
The ICQA programme sets one set of standards and one audit methodology to:
- Identify instances where caterers are non-compliant with safety and quality standards before it can affect inflight food
- Encourage industry best practices by reaching a common understanding between airlines and their caterers
- Provide airlines with an affordable programme demonstrating due diligence in the purchasing of inflight food
- Reduce audit costs significantly by enabling airlines and rail passenger carriers to pool together
- Save time and money for caterers, since there are fewer standards to comply with and fewer audits per facility per year.
In addition, ICQA participants benefit from:
- Automatic ICQA Council membership:
- Automatic ICQA Technical Committee membership
- Free access to the last Validation Audit Report and the last e-Audit Report for each submitted facility
- Ability to share audit costs with other ICQA participants when pooling at a particular ICQA facility
- Third-party auditing, appropriate audit frequency and worldwide coverage.
Want to join the ICQA programme?