KLM Catering Services (KCS) is the airline catering division of KLM, responsible for preparing thousands of meals and drinks daily for flights worldwide. This creates a huge logistical challenge: how much needs to be brought onboard? With limited insight into what passengers actually consume, it remains difficult to accurately match the actual demand. At the same time, there is a growing need for sustainability and improvement of the customer experience.
KLM Catering Services aims to better align the catering load on flights with the actual consumption of passengers in order to improve efficiency and enhance the customer experience. The first step was to find an efficient way to monitor and analyze catering product consumption in real time.
In partnership with Datacation and KLM, KCS began installing cameras that, using computer vision, automatically recorded how much serving ware was returned after a flight. This initial application laid the foundation for the next step: counting returned drinks. Eventually, the AI solution will also be able to recognize whether a drink is open or closed, and whether a meal has been partially consumed.
By counting the serving ware, KLM gained insights into how the dishwasher load factor could be improved. Additionally, real-time data on onboard catering consumption was collected. This enables KLM to load flights more efficiently, personalize offerings more precisely, and reduce unnecessary weight—benefiting both sustainability and customer experience. Currently, the solution is running on two daily flights. If the results continue to be positive, KCS sees opportunities to expand this technology in the future. There are also plans to integrate external data sources, such as seasonal factors, to better predict patterns. This shift moves KLM from observation to prediction—and ultimately to proactively managing customer behavior and operational efficiency.
Want to know more? Read our whitepaper on computer vision here!
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