Melbourne->Sydney, Monday 9:00pm, QF494
This is the last QANTAS flight out of Melbourne on a Monday evening, so as you can imagine, nobody really wants to be there. The food is generally forgettable, usually some kind of unusual dip that nobody would normally eat but you do because there isn’t anything else to do besides cry or watch butchered episodes of Spicks and Specks. This week, however I was surprisingly presented with a box of ‘Bites, by Byron Bay Gourmet Food’ including cheese and savoys, a cookie and a nibble mix.
Everyone loves miniature boxes of food. Remember the happy meal? Unfortunately there was no toy inside this box. I suppose the Pico cheese was difficult enough to open that it could almost be classified as a toy, but I don’t believe that was the intent. After finally managing to open the packet I cut up the cheese and placed the pieces on one of my three Savoys. Three. That’s it, just three. I know that the single use packets of Savoys generally come in three, but then again you usually get them at meeting centres so you just end up having a number of packets. Not on QANTAS though. Three. That’s all you’re getting.
Byron Bay Gourmet Foods have a specialty cookie company, aptly named Byron Bay Cookie Company, so I had high hopes for the cookie. Alas, my expectations were dashed when I was presented by something that shared an alarming number of characteristics with a rock. It wasn’t awful, but I was sort of expecting a little more for a cookie from a company that specialises in cookies. I caught an American Airlines flight earlier in the year and they gave me a warm, soft cookie fresh baked on the plane. That’s what I want from a cookie, not something where gourmet is being used as a synonym for hard.
The nibble mix was, well, nibble mix.
Kudos to QANTAS for mixing up the food a little bit. I really like the idea of a little food box with a bunch of different nibbles; it makes it so much more engaging. If they modify the contents slightly, I think they’re onto a winner. Oh, and add a toy. Everyone loves toys.