#LunchHandled
About CrewEats
I love aviation. Most of my working life happens inside an airport.
Fifty minutes on the ground. Deplane, cross the concourse, stand in the line — and the clock beats you back to the aircraft. Do it enough times and you stop trying.
I knew I couldn't have been alone — so we asked.
Gaurav Tavatia, Founder & CEO — airline captain, ALPA volunteer.
Who shaped the product
Flight deck and cabin crew, ramp agents, gate and ticketing staff, station managers — across 55 airports. We never named CrewEats, and never described a product before asking. The survey opened with one open question: what are the problems you face getting food at the airport? People started describing the answer in the box.
80%
would order more if it came to them
92%
want a dedicated crew pickup line
64%
say they don't have time to eat
55
airports represented
We only get 50–60 minutes on the ground, so the main problem is time. Getting out of the gate, waiting in line, ordering, then waiting for the food to be done takes too long… One [fix] would be the ability to order before I take off with a designated pickup time at that next destination. Another might include a gate delivery option.
Sometimes you think you have time to eat, but after trekking across the concourse you get to the restaurant and the line is extremely long, or they take forever to prepare the food. Sometimes I make the walk just to turn around and head back empty handed.
We regularly have 10+ hour duty days with no time to get food unless we bring our own. If there was a way to get food delivered to the gate when we aren't able to get off the plane, I would 100% use that on a very regular basis.
It takes me forever to get to where I need to get food that I want. I put myself in the position of my employees and it does the same thing. Keep pushing. Let's get this going.
We mostly either bring home cooked food or order from nearby restaurants and someone picks up for us.
Having 2 options of pickup such as a dedicated spot/line for employees ordering or picking up food. Alongside a delivery option to other parts of the airport.
Cafeteria is too far for what I like and not even time to get and come back and enjoy my lunch time.
I can't leave the BSO as I'm often the only one assigned there.
We also asked the restaurant managers — and they told us they watch crew and airport employees walk away from the lines every day, and wish they had a way to serve them.
Verbatim from our crew and airport-staff survey, lightly trimmed for length. No names, no roles, no airports — no respondent is identified.
Built from inside the operation
Most delivery companies meet the airport after the product is built, then find out about badging, escort rules, flight banks and break windows the hard way. We started on the other side of that line — and designed around it from the first sketch.
Timing is built around block-in and the next departure, not a neighborhood ETA. A five-minute slip isn't a late order here — it's a skipped meal and a hungry crew on the next flight.
Runners are SIDA-badged through the airport's own process and follow its access rules. Every deployment is shaped to the terminal it runs in — we work inside the operation, never around it.
Percentage rent, MAG floors, revenue per square foot, prep queues at the top of a flight bank. We're not learning your business on your time.
Who we take advice from
They shaped what CrewEats is, and they push back when it drifts. None of them are advising from outside the badge line. We don't publish their names; they have day jobs, and those day jobs are the reason their advice is worth having.
The people who train and standardize the flight deck. They know what a duty day actually allows, and what crews will and won't do with fifteen minutes.
People who have built and sold airport technology at scale — mobile identity at the border, and the airside delivery service that came before CrewEats. They know which parts of this are hard, because they hit them first.
Operations control. The room that sees the whole day at once and decides what moves when the day stops going to plan.
The concessions, operations and property side of an airport — the people who own the terminal experience and answer for it.
The capital side. The people who press on whether the business works, not just whether the product does — and who have seen what happens to companies that confuse the two.
Join us
Flight deck, cabin, gate, ramp, ops — if you carry a badge, this was built for you. Your first lunch is on us at launch.
First 1,000 sign-ups only.
Or partner with us