United Airlines Food 7858 — Foil sheets were pre-cut. Sarah Jacobs

We visited United Airlines' catering facility, Chelsea Food Services, near Newark International Airport in New Jersey,
Nothing was automated: Everything was made by hand, and all the ingredients were fresh.
The trick to airplane food is to only cook it halfway. Steak, for example, is cooked 30% of the way. The rest is done aboard the plane.
The facility is incredibly organized: Every meal, cart, and tray is efficiently produced, labeled, and dated.

Besides likening themselves to cattle shoved into an airborne metal tube, there's nothing airline passengers like to complain about more than how terrible airplane food is. But how and where those disappointing in-flight meals get made is rarely thought of.

United Airlines allowed our cameras into its catering facility, Chelsea Food Services, near Newark International Airport in New Jersey. Surprisingly, the food we saw was super fresh, made entirely by hand, and meticulously planned in advance.

Keep scrolling to see all of the work that goes into the making of your in-flight meals.

Welcome to United's Chelsea Food Services facility, where a team of 1,000 produces 33,000 meals per day.

This place is a machine — every meal, cart, and tray is efficiently produced, labeled, and dated.

The trick to airplane food is to only cook it halfway. Steak, for example, is cooked 30% of the way. The final cook is done onboard in the aircraft's convection ovens.

Items that do not need to be cooked, like this fruit salad, are made outside the hot kitchen. Fresh produce is delivered multiple times a day.

Here's a view from outside the hot kitchen. It looks pretty small when you consider that 33,000 meals come out of that space every day.

The facility must also supply flight attendants with the tools they need to prepare and serve the meals.

Everything the flight attendants could possibly need (think: tongs, ice scoopers) is niftily packed in an oven mitt.

The precise amount of serving equipment that each flight needs is planned and packed in these metal bins far in advance.

... which is to arrange the trays. Pictures on the walls show employees how to arrange food and what the final product should look like.

Completed trays are put into the same food carts you see onboard the plane. Each one is labeled with its flight number.

Once the carts have been loaded, they’re moved to an even colder room to be blast-chilled. This room is kept at a frosty 38 degrees; the people who work here wear heavy winter coats.

Here's the shocker: Meals can't sit for more than six to eight hours before boarding a plane. If a flight is delayed for more than a couple of hours, all of its meals could get thrown out and replaced. Not only is the food wasted, but employees must work overtime to get the new food ready.

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I toured the surprisingly small United Airlines catering facility where 33,000 in-flight meals are made entirely by hand every day