Flying Food Group, which currently provides inflight meals for Hawaiian Airlines at Los Angeles International Airport, is facing a new Cal/OSHA complaint alleging mold, vermin and other unsanitary conditions in its food-handling areas. We’ll get to a bit of the specifics below, but the short version is enough to make an old Hawaii flight habit feel timely once again.
We’ve been bringing our own food on Hawaii flights for nearly a decade. Not because we thought airline meals were dangerous, and not because of anything that happened this week, but because years of flying back and forth across the Pacific taught us not to depend on airline catering for the meal, timing, or quality we actually wanted.
Years ago, we stopped depending on Hawaii airline meals.
Longtime Beat of Hawaii readers may remember that our habit of bringing food aboard predates this controversy by years. We were already writing about living well at 30,000 feet nearly a decade ago, then later about how to skip the mystery meat and eat gourmet on Hawaii flights by bringing something aboard that we would actually look forward to eating.
We’ve also explained why we pack our own food on every Hawaii flight now. The habit developed gradually through years of Hawaii flying, good meals mixed with entirely forgettable ones, uneven service and the occasional catering debacle.
We have had airline meals to Hawaii that were fresh, thoughtful and genuinely enjoyable. But we’ve had plenty more that were oddly portioned, mistimed or simply not what we wanted after several hours in the air.
Then there are failures that have nothing to do with taste. In October 2025, we wrote about a United Polaris flight from Papeete to San Francisco where, as passengers, we went through the first three hours without any expected food service.
Point is, once you are over the Pacific, there is no backup food around the corner. And on a longer Hawaii flight of five, six or even ten hours, we would rather not make hunger dependent on which version of airline catering shows up that day.
Flying Food Group put airline catering back in the dismal spotlight.
Flying Food Group currently caters Hawaiian Airlines at LAX, the only U.S. carrier among 15 airlines the union says it serves there, alongside international carriers such as Air France, Lufthansa and ANA. The relationship dates back to at least 2010 and continues today under the combined Alaska-Hawaiian operation.
A 16-page complaint filed August 5 with California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health names two of Flying Food Group’s LAX-area facilities, not confirmed as the specific site preparing Hawaiian’s meals.
The most striking account comes from the worker who says she found decomposing food, mold and apparent maggots and flies inside an airline dish cart and was told to wash the dishes because they were needed for another flight.
The catering facilities had already drawn Cal/OSHA scrutiny before the most recent complaint, including prior citations this year with proposed penalties totaling $74,000. Cal/OSHA polices workplace safety rather than passenger food safety, so those citations do not establish that unsafe food reached an aircraft.
For us, the significance is much simpler. Airline catering is a complicated chain that passengers rarely see, and once the aircraft door closes, whatever was loaded is what you have. And as they say, you are what you eat.
We would rather control the meal ourselves.
Our approach is straightforward: bring food that travels well, that we actually want to eat and that will still be appealing several hours after leaving home or the hotel.
Good sandwiches, wraps, salads packed to travel, fresh fruit (never whole leaving Hawaii), nuts and snacks can all work. We have also brought genuinely excellent food aboard rather than treating the airport concourse as the last opportunity to grab whatever happens to be available.
There are practical limits. Liquids still have to comply with TSA, highly perishable foods need proper handling, and nobody seated nearby will thank you for bringing something that announces itself from three rows away.
The payoff is control. You decide what to eat, how much to bring and when to eat it, while a delayed meal service, missing catering cart or disappointing menu becomes far less consequential.
If the airline meal turns out to be great, enjoy it. If not, you already have something you chose yourself.
Nearly 10 years of doing it this way.
Our earliest articles on eating better aboard Hawaii flights were written years before the current Flying Food Group complaint. Since then, self-catering has gone from something we experimented with to one of the routines we now take for granted.
That progression also fits with what we recently described in After Hundreds Of Hawaii Flights, Here Is What We Do Differently. Years of frequent Hawaii flying have made us increasingly selective about which parts of the trip we leave to chance.
Food is one of the easiest parts to control. That was true long before this week’s headlines, and the latest airline catering controversy gave us no reason to hand that control back to the airline.
We’re curious how you handle food on Hawaii flights. Do you rely on the airline meal, bring your own, grab something at the airport—or skip eating altogether? Tell us what works best for you and why.
Lead Photo Credit: © Beat of Hawaii – United Airlines Premium Economy Meal.
By Rob and Jeff, Beat of Hawaii.
Some of the most meaningful parts of Hawaii are the ones visitors walk right past without knowing they are there. We’ve spent nearly 20 years finding them firsthand for BOH as full-time Hawaii residents reporting on travel, culture, and island life, and telling you what they mean for your trip. Join us →
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