I can top it, from the WSJ>
Knife Fight Continues After Sept. 11
As Plastic and Metal Vie for Victory
By DANIEL MICHAELS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
COLOGNE, Germany -- Maarten Grisel holds a butter knife in one hand and the printout of a Federal Aviation Administration e-mail in the other. The e-mail confirms that the knife is dull, which is great news.
"This is a reason to celebrate," says Mr. Grisel, vice president of Sola Airline Cutlery BV, a Dutch stainless-steel maker that is a big supplier to airlines. "We can compete again."
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, aviation authorities around the world issued an open-ended ban on metal steak knives and other metal utensils. But most countries allowed some stainless-steel butter knives on board, and now Sola and a few rivals are pitching these as alternatives to the plastic knives that airlines have been using.
It's another battle in an airline tableware war that began long before Sept. 11. On one side is stainless steel, which is durable and classy but heavy and expensive, and on the other side is plastic, which is cheap and lightweight but scorned by high-paying passengers and environmentalists.
At stake is a big business. Last year, Sola sold 250 million pieces of airline tableware, including about $20 million of stainless-steel knives to 70 carriers. One customer alone, AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, bought 10 million settings.
An inexpensive stainless-steel setting costs about $1, compared with less than five cents for plastic. Metal utensils' biggest cost is labor: fishing them out of the garbage, cleaning and sorting them and then repacking whole sets. Even then, a metal set averages only seven to 20 uses because lots are thrown out accidentally, and others are pocketed by passengers. Metal cutlery also weighs at least seven times as much as plastic, or the equivalent of a fare-paying passenger on a big jetliner.
After Sept. 11, plastic cutlery looked like the clear victor in the tableware war. As U.S. carriers started flying again after several days' grounding, airlines that hadn't scrapped food service needed sanctioned cutlery, and fast. Timothy Thomsen, head of procurement at the world's largest producer of airline meals, LSG Sky Chefs Inc., a unit of Germany's Deutsche Lufthansa AG, had three employees on his staff in Irving, Texas, working 18-hour days to find plastic suppliers. "Aesthetics didn't matter," he says.
But now they do, and the plastic contingent is racing to come up with implements that meet airlines' exacting design demands. At a recent trade fair of the International Flight Catering Association here, Racket Group of Kansas City, Mo., a longtime stainless-steel hawker, had on display a new art deco-styled plastic setting. Finnish food-packaging maker Huhtamaki Oyj offered see-through, rainbow-hued tableware. Medstar Industrial Co., a small Egyptian contender, had a set it claims can stand 40 washings.
The plastic makers argue they have a clear edge over metal. Even before Sept. 11, "you'd have trouble cutting a fried egg with most of the stainless steel" on airlines, says Michael Thomas, managing director of W.K. Thomas & Co., a British family operation that has seen its sales of plastic utensils more than double in recent months.
Plastic also helps calm anxious passengers. Thomas Deitz, a London-based equity analyst, says he was shocked in December to get a metal knife on an Air France flight from Paris to Bangkok. (Since January, Air France has used plastic knives on all its flights.)
Metal makers concede their business has been badly dented. Peter Kranes, managing director of Abco International, a division of Oneida Ltd. and one of the world's biggest makers of airline cutlery, says the company's stainless-steel sales will drop by $12 million this year.
But plastic is still plastic, and some feel it can tarnish a ritzy business -- or a first-class cabin. "If you're in a nice restaurant with good food, you don't expect to eat with plastic," says Laurens Geheniau, managing director of AVG Inflight, a small Belgian supplier of plastic and metal airline-cabin equipment. The company recently designed metal cutlery to address safety concerns, including a knife with a very short cutting edge and a fork with ultra-short tines.
Meanwhile, Abco, like Sola, is seeking regulatory approval for a butter-knife variant. And it has potential customers. "I want metal back on board," says Jim Armstrong, who manages dining logistics at Continental Airlines. To speed the return, he's working with Abco on ideas, including removing the serration from thousands of knives the airline already owns.
Still, some service-oriented carriers think that no matter what they are made of, dull knives are pointless. Peter Viinapuu, vice president for inflight services at Scandinavian Airlines System, scoffs that blunt, round metal knives will just "annoy passengers." He says he will stick with the plastic.
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All they need to do is put a Glock loaded with frangible bullets in the cockpit. |
