About us

Our market

The global aviation catering market remains a cornerstone of the travel industry, characterized by structural resilience and a clear path for sustained growth. While the sector has faced historical challenges, the consistent recovery of passenger volumes highlights the indispensable nature of air travel. Looking ahead, the market is poised for significant expansion, particularly within the Asia-Pacific corridor.

Catering is an operationally vital but complex service for airlines, and complexity is increasing due to rising regulatory demands, especially in areas like food safety and supply chain management. By outsourcing catering to a specialized provider for these vital services, like gategroup, airlines reduce complexity, sharpen their focus on core operations, and ensure operational stability and excellence.

The trend toward premium and customized in-flight experiences continues, with worldwide premium-class travel, including first, business class and premium economy passengers, is growing strongly. This reflects the overall trend toward premiumization, as leisure travel remains a priority purchase, especially for younger generations. Airlines are responding to this shift for a higher-value customer experience across all travel classes, which, in turn, accelerates outsourcing to specialized caterers, as airlines find it increasingly challenging to match the same level of quality with in-house solutions.

To further solidify our market position, we continue to expand into synergistic adjacencies via Food Solutions. By leveraging our existing infrastructure and logistics expertise, we are diversifying our revenue streams, improving asset utilization, and building a more balanced, de-risked business model.

Our business

gategroup’s proven track record of delivering customer success is driven by a unique combination of global reach, culinary excellence, and a high-performance culture that remains unmatched in the industry. Through our IGNITE 2030 strategy, we are hard-wiring digitalization, automation, and procurement centralization into our core operations, creating a clear path for continued margin improvement and innovation-led growth. We have reset our structural baseline, ensuring our global scale is paired with the local agility required to deliver consistent, compliant execution at every station.

To execute this vision, we have optimized our lines of service into two synergistic core segments:

By operating as "one gategroup," we leverage centralized standards and a technology-enabled operating model to deliver the precise, accountable, and sustainable experiences that define the future of travel.

Our brands

From menu design to execution and delivery, we work closely with our airline partners and culinary community to develop innovative and authentic creations that delight the senses of passengers around the world.

Operating a wide variety of airport services and and catering facilities across the region. servair has made its culinary identity a strategic priority, bringing together the world’s greatest French chefs to raise the quality standards of onboard catering.

gateretail enhances the passenger experience through our award-winning, omni-channel retail programs for our airline and train customers. gateretail’s programs are designed to drive increased revenue streams through data-driven programs, technological innovation and training.

Drawing on deep  expertise to deliver seamless solutions to customers internationally, gatesolutions train catering fosters a preference among leisure and business travelers for this fast-growing and sustainable form of travel.

Serving leading customers in the aviation, train, and quick service restaurant market  around the globe. Prioritizing environmental goals, deSter achieved EcoVadis Platinum certification and is focusing on a recyclable, reusable, and compostable product range.

uqonic creates bespoke lounge strategies, blending culinary creations with management, hospitality training and serviceware solutions among other services.

Evertaste’s central kitchens provide consistent, high-quality large batches of frozen meals, snacks, and dessert to customers internationally, including airlines and food service clients.

Our culinary leadership

gategroup is proud to have built the largest global community of culinary chefs and experts in the aviation industry. With their exceptional skills in the traditional cuisines of their home countries, in-depth knowledge of local ingredients, and mastery of ancient cooking techniques, they infuse each dish with innovation and creativity. Equally important, they contribute their best ideas to meeting our targets for bringing sustainable dining solutions to the market.

Our operations

At the heart of gategroup’s performance lies the excellence of its operations. Every day, across hundreds of kitchens and logistics flows worldwide, our teams deliver under intense time pressure and constantly changing conditions. Aircraft schedules shift, customer expectations rise, and complexity continues to grow. Yet our commitment remains unchanged: to deliver the right meal, at the right quality, at the right time, every time.

This commitment is embodied in gateopex, our global Operational Excellence program. gateopex was created to define and implement common operational standards across our worldwide network while integrating technology and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. It provides the structure that ensures safety for our employees and customers, compliance with industry and regulatory requirements and sustainable performance in quality, cost, delivery, and service. Over the years, gateopex has established a shared operational language and strong global process standards, creating a recognizable movement toward operational excellence throughout our organization.

At the same time, listening closely to our operations community made one reality clear: while pride and ownership are strong across our teams, complexity, legacy systems, and uneven adoption of standards can limit our ability to scale excellence consistently. In a fast-moving and demanding environment, improvement cannot rely on individual effort alone. It must be embedded into the way we work every day.

This realization has led to the introduction of the gategroup Production System (GPS). GPS is not a new program layered on top of existing initiatives. It is the operating system that brings them together. Inspired by the world’s leading production systems, GPS connects people, processes and technology into one coherent framework. It transforms strategy into daily discipline and aligns thousands of small decisions made across our network into one consistent direction.

GPS is lean, data-enabled, and people-driven. It creates stability in daily operations through clear standards, structured management routines, and visible performance dialogue. It strengthens accountability while building capabilities at every level of the organization. It leverages digital tools to increase transparency, automate routine activities, and enable better decision-making through reliable data. Most importantly, it shifts our mindset from reacting to problems toward preventing them, from firefighting to foresight.

For our customers, this means greater reliability and consistency, even in the face of last-minute aircraft changes. For our employees, it means clearer priorities, stronger leadership support, and structured opportunities to develop skills. For our shareholders, it means improved predictability, reduced waste, and scalable productivity across our global footprint.

The implementation of GPS follows a structured and disciplined path. Beginning with targeted pilots and opportunity reviews at unit level, we establish a clear understanding of operational maturity, identify improvement priorities, and translate them into actionable roadmaps owned by local leadership. From there, best practices are scaled across regions in a phased deployment that will embed GPS as the standard operating system across our units.

Operational excellence is not achieved through isolated initiatives or large one-time decisions. It is built through the structures that guide hundreds of daily actions, through shared principles that align teams, and through the discipline to improve continuously. With gateopex and the introduction of GPS, gategroup is strengthening its operational DNA, evolving its model, enhancing stability, and creating the foundation for long-term, sustainable performance in an increasingly complex world.

Procurement and supply chain

It is essential that we maintain our core strengths in procurement and supply chain management. We meet that challenge by leveraging our size, experience, reputation, and relationships to source and procure products and services in a wide range of categories, and maintain our record of meeting customer requirements and optimizing pricing.

Our extensive partnership programs, network for consortium buying, and systematic tendering process are complemented on the technology side by a procurement process that employs data, demand, and cost management tools.

Information technologies (IT)

Intelligent, strategic use of cutting-edge technology is an imperative for any company with a commitment to upholding the highest standards of innovation and excellence. The members of gategroup’s IT team are architects of the sustainable, secure, and agile digital solutions necessary to fulfill our obligations to customers, partners, and investors.

People - planet - product

At gategroup, we view our social, environmental, and commercial goals as mutually reinforcing. From cultivating an empowering company culture to implementing high-efficiency waste and resource management, gategroup integrates sustainability into every facet of our operations. Our global ESG Framework serves as a strong foundation of gategroup’s ESG management and as a reference point for concrete measures to achieve our sustainability goals.

The group maintained its EcoVadis Bronze rating during 2025 but again achieved an increase in its score (from 64 to 68), with advancements across all assessed areas. This places gategroup in the top 35% of companies assessed by EcoVadis worldwide. Our subsidiary deSter distinguished itself again by earning the EcoVadis Platinum rating for the second year in a row, putting it in the top 1% of evaluated companies. Our brand servair leaped from a Bronze rating in 2024 to Gold in 2025.

Following the necessary adjustments caused by the Double Materiality Process and the subsequent revision of the ESG Framework, gategroup continues the process of integrating ESG into its Internal Controls System for internal auditing purposes. Our ESG objectives are part of the performance evaluation of the Executive Management Board, functional topic owners, and the General Managers of gategroup’s operating units. In 2025, a dedicated e-learning program on sustainability was launched, contributing to realizing the group’s sustainability ambitions.