Emirates Flight Catering Brand Guidelines: A Dubai Kitchen, Linencraft and Bustanica

An airline’s kitchen at Dubai International.

Emirates Flight Catering, known by the initials EKFC, is the in-flight caterer of the Emirates Group in Dubai. English Wikipedia says it was formed in 2003 out of the Emirates Abela Catering Company, and that it supplies the Emirates airline and the other carriers at Dubai International Airport. The company says it is 90 percent owned by Emirates, with the remaining shares held by Dubai Airports Corporation; its board lists directors from both, under the chairman of the Emirates Group.

Its facilities grew alongside the airline. Wikipedia records a Food Point production facility at Dubai Investment Park opening in July 2005. The company says it launched a complex dedicated to Emirates flights in 2007, with a built-up area of more than 56,000 square metres, and that in November 2018 it added a wing for producing First and Business Class meals. It also describes a rooftop solar plant of 8,112 panels that supplies part of the power for its laundry, food manufacturing and staff accommodation.

Most of the figures about its size come from the company itself. Its fact sheet, marked accurate as of February 2023, gives an average of about 220,000 meals a day for Emirates, more than 100 other airlines and airport lounges, around 445 flights catered each day, and more than 10,000 employees, including more than 1,400 chefs working across more than 3,500 menus. Behind the trays sits heavy machinery: the same document describes a 4.5-kilometre electric monorail that carries meal carts from the warewash area to the cart washers and on to flight preparation, and says an average of 3.1 million pieces of catering equipment are washed there each day. Its About page says staff come from 69 nations. The Emirates Group website describes it as caterer to more than 120 airlines departing Dubai International and Dubai World Central. In 2024 the aviation news site AeroTime called it one of the largest in-flight catering operations.

Linencraft, Foodcraft and a farm.

EKFC presents itself as more than an airline kitchen. Its website groups the work into airline and airport catering; Foodcraft, a food-solutions arm covering food services and events catering; and Linencraft, a laundry business. Wikipedia says Linencraft’s plant at Dubai Investment Park can handle 210 tons of laundry and dry cleaning a day after an expansion in 2007. Linencraft, a wholly owned subsidiary, received ISO 9001 certification from SGS Gulf in October 2025, the company said. The 2023 fact sheet lists retail products sold under the Emperor Ice Cream and Sapori Pasta names, Foodcraft as an online ordering platform, and an Emirati Kitchen catering offer with traditional Emirati and international menus.

Its most visible new name is a farm. The fact sheet says Bustanica opened in 2022 in partnership with Crop One Holdings, and AeroTime dates its launch to July 2022, at a site near Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central. In February 2024 EKFC took full ownership of the business, formerly called Emirates Crop One; AeroTime described its 330,000-square-foot facility as the largest indoor vertical farm, growing lettuce, spinach, parsley and kale for EKFC’s salads and for UAE supermarkets. The farm was a preferred produce supplier for the COP28 conference in November 2023, the same report says.

In January 2026 EKFC and Bustanica made a joint debut at the Gulfood trade show in Dubai, EKFC’s first standalone presence there, Travel Daily Media reported. Its range included cold cuts and sausages made by a German master butcher, omelettes, soups, sauces, pasta and beef Wellingtons, made across three facilities, while Bustanica showed ready-to-eat salads, juices and a limited run of strawberries, along with cold-pressed juices and popsicles made with edible flowers.

Travel retail and airline catering.

Most companies in travel retail and travel dining sell under other names as well as their own. HMSHost, part of Avolta, says it works with more than 400 international, regional, local and proprietary brands, and SSP divides its portfolio between concepts it has created and brands it franchises from other companies, according to their websites. Their corporate sites speak to two audiences at once: HMSHost’s has pages for business developers and partners, and SSP’s has sections on its markets, its brands and its investors, alongside the restaurant and shop names a traveller actually sees.

Trade press describes the units themselves in practical terms. Reports in The Moodie Davitt Report give a venue’s floor area, its seat count, whether it sits airside or landside and how many self-order kiosks it has, as in its March 2025 account of a 65-seat Shake Shack at Boston Logan. They often stress local character too: SSP’s November 2026 opening at Auckland Airport was described as a coffee-led café drawing on New Zealand’s coffee culture.

Industry awards give design its own categories. The 2025 FAB Awards, organised by The Moodie Davitt Report, included Airport Restaurant Design of the Year and Airport Food Hall of the Year, according to SSP’s list of its wins, and HMSHost lists airport bar and restaurant awards from readers’ polls and trade titles on its own site. Motorway sites mix the same elements: in 2021 the same publication described HMSHost’s American service areas as combining branded food and drink concepts with convenience retail.

Ownership is part of the story these companies tell. HMSHost explains that it joined Avolta in 2023 after Dufry and Autogrill combined, and SSP’s history page runs from an airline catering division founded in 1961 to a London listing in 2014. This guide sets out who founded each company, who owns it now and which brands it runs, and keeps each company’s own claims apart from what independent dated sources report.

An airline lockup with “Flight Catering” beneath.

EKFC’s visual identity borrows directly from its parent airline. On the cover of its 2023 fact sheet, the Emirates calligraphy and the Emirates wordmark sit in a gold-brown above a thin rule, with the words “Flight Catering” set below in red. Its website loads typefaces from a shared Emirates font library rather than a separate set of its own.

Events have become a visible part of the business. EKFC was the official caterer for the Dubai Airshow in November 2025, preparing to serve more than 300,000 meals from two central kitchens built on site in about two weeks, with nearly 2,600 staff, Travel Daily Media reported; its chief executive said the company’s Dubai World Central facility could produce 150,000 meals a day. In February 2026 the company said it had commissioned a large biodigester at its central commissary unit to treat organic waste on site rather than send it to landfill.

The company’s stated values are “We Care, We Inspire, We Are One, We Drive, We Innovate,” and its stated vision is to be “the most admired and innovative culinary solutions provider.” Its news pages show the same register: plain announcements about kitchens, laundry and produce, with the airline’s name always close by.

For a design guide, Emirates Flight Catering shows how a supplier can sit inside an airline’s identity while building separate names for laundry, food products and a farm. Compare LSG Sky Chefs and Newrest, two other airline caterers. For this guide we use a bronze, warm sand and a deep red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Emirates Flight Catering’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.