Nitin Trikha, CEO, integrated facility management and food & hospitality services, Bluspring Enterprises, on building an integrated aviation services platform
Bluspring Enterprises is looking to use its acquisition of LSG Sky Chefs India to build a broader aviation services platform that combines airline catering with facilities management, food and hospitality services.
Nitin Trikha, CEO, Integrated Facility Management and Food & Hospitality Services, Bluspring Enterprises, tells BW Retail World that the strategy goes beyond entering airline catering, with the company eyeing opportunities across the wider airport ecosystem, including lounges, airport food, passenger services and institutional catering.
How do you expect the LSG India acquisition to strengthen Bluspring’s position in the aviation services space?
A: Indian aviation has been going through a structural shift. The number of operational airports stood at around 74 in 2014; today, that figure has doubled to about 166. The government has also recently announced plans for 100 more airports over the next decade. Passenger traffic has grown phenomenally; India is now seeing more than 420 million passengers annually.
Bengaluru is a good example of this trajectory. It is currently handling close to 45 million passengers in FY26, with international traffic growing at about 24 per cent. As connectivity increases and more people travel, the opportunity in India’s aviation sector will continue to grow.
For us at Bluspring, this acquisition is much more than just an entry into airline catering. It gives us a foothold in an aviation ecosystem that is expanding rapidly and evolving into a broader services ecosystem — spanning airline catering, airport food, lounges, facilities, security, baggage handling and other hospitality-led services around the passenger journey.
We already have a significant presence in institutional food, hospitality and facilities management. LSG brings aviation-specific capabilities and an operating base into this portfolio. We’re bringing together capabilities that have largely operated in different parts of the ecosystem, creating the possibility of serving a much wider set of requirements.
For instance, as airports expand and international connectivity grows, airline lounges and premium passenger services will become far more significant within the airport ecosystem. Our hospitality business already understands high-touch dining and CXO-level events across corporate and education clients — that’s a natural extension into aviation.
The strategic logic is simple: we’re not building an aviation business in isolation. We are using aviation to extend the food and hospitality platform that we’ve already been building at Bluspring, while also bringing aviation capability into that larger platform.
Passenger expectations have increased significantly as the overall travel experience evolves. How is Bluspring approaching the evolution of in-flight catering — from a functional service to a more premium, differentiated hospitality offering?
A: In-flight food is no longer a meal that simply meets a basic service requirement. With flights spanning three, even four hours domestically, comparable to some international routes between India and Southeast Asia, longer durations have real implications for in-flight food. Passengers are becoming more conscious of quality, variety, presentation and consistency, and these details are increasingly contributing to how they experience an airline.
That said, I would distinguish this from outright premiumisation. Indian travellers are growing in number, but they are also becoming much more diverse in their expectations. A passenger flying economy on a domestic business route may want something very different from someone flying business or premium economy on the same sector.
That is where the true opportunity lies for us. We have the expertise to understand food and hospitality across large and diverse consumer environments — a corporate executive, a student, a first-time traveller, or someone with a medical or dietary need will all have very different expectations. The strength of Bluspring comes from that depth of understanding.
The way I look at it, it is relevance first, premiumisation second. Food has to make sense for the passenger, the route, the duration of the flight and the airline proposition, while meeting the consistency, safety and operational requirements that aviation demands.
The next phase of airline food in India will be less about making the tray look premium and more about making the food experience feel relevant. Airlines that get that balance right will genuinely make food a part of their overall brand. Jet Airways set a strong benchmark in this space, Vistara carried that thinking forward, and several airlines today are increasingly moving in a similar direction.
Food is one of the few tangible parts of a journey that a passenger truly experiences and remembers. That makes it much more than a catering requirement; it becomes part of the airline experience. That’s where our experience at scale, our understanding of varied consumer mindsets, our knowledge of what premium, functional and diet-specific mean, and our ability to apply this alongside the technical complexities of aviation catering will help us differentiate.
The Bengaluru aviation kitchen is designed to handle around 15,000 meals a day, with stringent hygiene norms, cold-chain and digital traceability requirements. What are the biggest operational and technology challenges in running an aviation kitchen at this scale, and how are you addressing them?
A: At Bluspring, we’ve built a strong leadership team with deep, specialised expertise across aviation catering, and the way we often describe an aviation kitchen internally captures it best. An aviation kitchen like the LSG Sky Chefs kitchen facility at Kempegowda International Airport requires the precision of a pharmaceutical clean room, the hygiene of an operating theatre in the best hospitals, married to the logistics of an automotive assembly line. It’s like playing a symphony that must sound identical every single day, without a single note going out of tune.
The hygiene standards required in an aviation kitchen are difficult for most institutional or restaurant kitchens to match. Operating at this volume under international civil aviation standards requires tight control over zoning, thermal curves and digital verification.
Airline food demands a stringent cold chain and traceability, from sourcing the product, receiving, storing, processing and preparing it, all under temperature-controlled environments, followed by blast chilling to maintain taste, consistency and hygiene, and then maintaining that cold chain until the food is handed over to the cabin crew.
To get slightly more technical, under HACCP and ISO 22000 food safety standards for airline catering, hot food must drop from cooking temperatures of 74–80°C to below 5 degree under 90 to 120 minutes in a high-throughput blast chiller. The holding chillers then maintain temperatures between 2–4°C until the tray is assembled.
Our Bengaluru kitchen is designed exactly around this. It’s both a flame kitchen and an induction kitchen; food is cooked at 74–80°C, immediately moved to a high-throughput blast chiller and then into a temperature-controlled holding area.
We also have end-to-end digital traceability. Every raw ingredient batch is logged in ERP software that links vendor lots to specific flight numbers, aircraft tail numbers and tray barcodes. Real-time IoT temperature sensors continuously stream data across hold rooms, blast chillers and dispatch docks, generating auditable telemetry for strict airline safety audits by carriers such as Lufthansa, Qatar Airways and Etihad.
That is the level of detail an airline catering kitchen requires to operate under international civil aviation standards.
How are you balancing regional Indian culinary identity with international food safety, consistency and menu standards? Could you share examples of how regional flavours are being adapted for airline menus without losing their authenticity?
A: Our culinary strategy is not about simply putting Indian flavours into an international format, or vice versa. It’s important to understand that the airline kitchen doesn’t work in isolation; every airline has its own catering team, and menus are jointly deliberated and finalised. It is then up to the airline kitchen to deliver that menu with consistency.
At Bluspring, when we work with airline catering teams, we emphasise retaining the authenticity and familiarity of regional Indian food while delivering the consistency, presentation, food safety discipline and repeatability that international aviation demands.
India offers an extraordinary culinary canvas. Flavour preferences shift significantly from one region to another. For many travellers, food carries a strong sense of familiarity and identity. Our opportunity is to take those regional cues — the spices, cooking styles, ingredients and comfort flavours — and translate them intelligently for an in-flight environment.
At the same time, an airline menu has to work across different passenger profiles, routes and airline brand standards. Recipes must be standardised, ingredients tightly controlled, portioning precise, and the final product must remain true to its intended taste and texture through preparation, holding and service.
With LSG Sky Chefs India now part of Bluspring, we bring two complementary strengths: LSG as a mature catering platform serving leading domestic and international airlines, and Bluspring’s country-wide network of kitchens and chefs with deep regional expertise. Together, we are combining cultural understanding with operational precision. Our ambition is simple — make regional Indian food feel genuinely Indian, while making its execution world-class.
As an example, our Executive Chef at the Bengaluru airport kitchen recently collaborated with our regional chefs at Bluspring to create a sweet dim sum filled with lauki halwa — a delicious fusion of an Asian format and an Indian classic that reflects the kind of innovation we are driving.
Beyond aviation, Bluspring is building an integrated food and facility platform spanning campuses, transit hubs, airports and airlines. How does LSG India fit into this larger strategy, and can a concession-led, capital-efficient model turn individual kitchens into scalable hubs serving airlines, lounges, airport retail and institutional catering?
A: When you look at an airport, you see multiple service lines, each seemingly requiring different expertise. As an integrated infrastructure service provider, our advantage at Bluspring is being able to view the airport as one ecosystem rather than as separate service lines.
Bluspring already delivers facility services at four major Indian airports. With the LSG Sky Chefs acquisition, we have now added an established aviation food operation to our portfolio. These two capabilities have traditionally been managed as separate service lines — making us probably the only company in India today that brings both together.
For us, this creates the opportunity to build an integrated aviation services proposition. We are among the first Indian companies bringing both capabilities together within the same aviation ecosystem — housekeeping, technical engineering, maintenance, baggage handling, passenger handling, security services and aviation food operations under one roof.
The immediate value isn’t about putting two businesses together for their own sake; it’s about what the combination enables us to understand and serve over time. An airport is a complex ecosystem with multiple touchpoints across the passenger journey, and the synergies between our businesses are very real. Our institutional food business brings an established procurement, supply chain and culinary network, while our aviation business operates in a highly specialised, timing-sensitive environment. Bringing the two together creates meaningful efficiencies in sourcing, kitchens and supply chains, making our meal proposition for airlines more optimised and cost-effective than what most players in this space can offer.
An aviation catering kitchen also opens up a much wider food ecosystem beyond airlines alone. Over time, and subject to the relevant frameworks, there is a meaningful opportunity to extend our services to the broader airport community, including the airport workforce, airline offices, concessionaires and other institutional requirements within the ecosystem.
The strategic advantage lies in the combination of all capabilities. We do not view airline catering, facilities management and institutional food as three unrelated businesses. We see an opportunity to build a more integrated aviation services platform around a common ecosystem — an approach that is still relatively uncommon in the Indian aviation landscape.
