Food labelling
The Airline Catering Association permanently monitors the relevant EU legislation and any legislative procedure (national and global) in particular in respect of food law for the airline catering business. As an example, ACA’s goal is to initiate discussion with the EU Commission concerning the interpretation of specific articles of the “Food information to consumers Regulation” (FIC) (Regulation 1169/2011). Furthermore, the Airline Catering Association is of the opinion that a level of standardization would benefit airlines, caterers, consumers such as the necessity of unitary language for the labelling of pre-packed food in the airline catering business with English as lingua franca.
Cabin & Food waste
There is an urgent necessity for the society as a whole to manage in a more sustainable way the waste that is produced after each flight. This waste amounted to 5.7m tonnes in 2017 according to IATA. It has been demonstrated that an important amount could either be reused, or redistributed safely. But the current legislation, such as EU Regulation 1069/2009, allows for no flexibility and forces airlines to incinerate part of the waste. ACA believes this should change.
Security
One of the primary goals of ACA is to ensure that there is a consistent approach taken across all jurisdictions to various regulatory matters, including security. ACA wants to ensure that Members and Customers alike can be confident that when it comes to security no matter where you are that the regulations will be uniformly applied. ACA is of the opinion that an industry wide set of agreed guidelines and principles should be produced and which all Members can sign up to and that this will be in the best interests of all stakeholders. ACA will be working with all relevant stakeholders to produce, agree and implement these guidelines.
Tax & VAT
Inflight catering is by nature an activity with international ramifications. The current VAT legislation, especially in Europe (e.g. Directive 2006/112/EC), makes it extremely cumbersome for caterers to calculate, and honour, their dues due the difficulty to combine the concept of country of origin to multi-legged journeys. ACA is hence considering different options to help minimize these difficulties.
Single-Use Plastics
The Airline Catering Association is very much in favour of the efforts undertaken by the EU to incentivize the use of more environmentally-friendly materials and to get rid of single-use plastics that hoard our littorals and beaches. However, the Association warns against hasty decisions and poorly drafted impact assessments that fail to account for the reality and conflict with other legislation. The obligation to incinerate cabin waste, or the additional weight that non-plastic products could imply with adverse effects on the plane’s emissions of CO2 are just two examples of a more complex picture than it seems. ACA will work hand in hand with the EU to minimize these conflicts and their negative effects.