Airline Selling 10-Year Expired Cheese Toasties as Buy Onboard

American Airlines domestic meals are really bad. I don’t want to eat them. But I rarely question whether it’s safe to do so. easyJet meals, however, may be another story.


American Airlines ‘First Class’ Breakfast

A man flying home to the UK purchased a cheese toastie on an easyJet flight and found that his packaged meal had expired ten years ago.

Flight attendants joked he should be charged more ‘for an antique’. Airline customer service ignored his complaints until they began to get media attention, but the airline now claims it was “obviously” a “manual printing error.”

The man says that even after he brought the expired sandwich to flight attendants’ attention, they continued offering them for sale. And, he concedes, “It was still really tasty, to be honest, but it was over cooked.”

Ryanair enjoyed the negative publicity easyJet got over this. Ryanair isn’t likely to have the same problem, their food moves quickly because their flight attendants have minimum sales quotas.

(HT: Chris R.)

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Im sure it was pretty yummy, but in defense, I did look up the date formats for Europe and this is what i found’ “The European Union and other international organizations do not use the European style but rather the “‘ISO 8601’ standard date format. Here the organisation is closer to the US dating but with the year placed at the start, for example 2016/06/07”

  2. Mike: More people fly Ryanair (not RyanAir) than any other airline in Europe.
    #LookWhatTheyDo_NotWhatTheySay
    #ActionsSpeakLouderThanWords

  3. I really hope that is just a labeling convention confusion like @Jeff says, because the thought of 10 yr old expired food makes me sick just thinking about it.

  4. Even with that date format, the sandwich would still be expired for more than a year!
    Apparently Y2K was not enough to teach people to use 4 digits for the year.

  5. @Jeff: And even if the European convention is used, then the food is still out of date by more than a year. That’s not much of a defense, if you ask me.

  6. Of course, in the US at least, there’s no such thing as an “expiration date”.

    From the FDA Food Product Dating website:
    “Are Dates for Food Safety or Quality?
    Manufacturers provide dating to help consumers and retailers decide when food is of best quality. Except for infant formula, dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety and are not required by Federal law.” (http://bit.ly/2fSFVgU)

    In Europe, publishing a date appears to be a waste reduction technique:
    “Better understanding and use of date marking on food, i.e. ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates, can prevent and reduce food waste in the EU.” (http://bit.ly/2wprTt0)

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