Tampa, Fla.-based Air Culinaire Worldwide (Booths C10429, C10435) is launching its first crowdsourced inflight catering menu for business aviation here at NBAA 2015. Air Culinaire is a Universal Weather and Aviation company with 20 kitchens and hundreds of catering affiliates scattered around the globe.

“The best way to produce a comprehensive menu is to work directly with the community to understand what they want,” said Stacey Farooqui, director of marketing for Air Culinaire. “Through the reach of social media we now have a menu that includes crowdsourced items in which the whole community can feel ownership.” The menu, created via a social media-based focus group of corporate flight attendants from around the world, includes items and concepts based on their direct input.

Air Culinaire worked with a group of more than 120 corporate flight attendants during a three-month time period to ask questions and foster input into every component of the inflight catering menu creation and packaging process. The result? The company introduced a ceramic packaging option, as well as a new a la carte menu category. Air Culinaire Worldwide plans to continue to use a corporate flight attendant focus group via Facebook for menu planning in the future, according to Farooqui.