With Shake Shack in First Class, Airline Food Is No Longer a Joke

By all accounts, airlines have no business serving cheeseburgers on flights. Airplane food is essentially glorified leftovers: Whatever gets served at 35,000 feet gets cooked ahead of time, chilled to a safe temperature and then reheated in the air—a bit like trying to re-create last night’s restaurant meal for today’s dinner. The process is full of potential pitfalls, and to deliver a burger, you have to avoid all of them: soggy bread, hockey-puck meat, bland taste, wilted lettuce.

But Delta Air Lines Inc. went for it with the rollout of burgers from Shake Shack Inc., offered to first-class passengers on longer domestic routes from several of its top hubs starting in March after a Boston test run. It’s proved so popular that burgers now account for nearly 15% of the roughly 4,500 hot meals prepped every day at the company’s Atlanta flight kitchen. Just a few weeks into the expanded program, the on-ground facility is ordering a third bun-toasting-and-buttering machine—the same ones Shake Shack uses in its restaurants—to make sure it can keep up.