How gategroup transformed airline menu development with an award-winning AI platform

“Innovation cannot come at the cost of stability,” said Sandro Bregante, CIO of gategroup. “Marlabs has been a trusted technology partner for nearly two decades, bringing a deep understanding of our business and operational requirements...”

Summary

The chefs and commercial teams at gategroup, a leading airline catering and onboard retail company that serves more than 680 million passengers a year in over 68 countries, developed airline menus through a legacy, SACS-based workflow of copy-paste assembly and spreadsheet tracking. The process consumed culinary time, risked compliance around allergens and special meals, and left commercial leaders without a consolidated view of active menus.

Marlabs worked alongside gategroup's chefs, commercial teams, and procurement to design and deliver an AI-enabled menu development platform. The platform reads inbound airline briefs across multiple file types, extracts the requirements, and generates a complete first-draft menu inside a single digital workspace. Chefs now spend less time assembling documents and more time on culinary craft and the passenger experience, and commercial leaders can see active menus across the organization.

Information Services Group (ISG), a global research and advisory firm, awarded Marlabs and gategroup the 2026 ISG Paragon Standout Award for Exceptional Individual Contribution in the Transformation category for this work.

Challenge

Menu development at gategroup happens inside a demanding operation: millions of meals, hundreds of kitchens, thousands of ingredients, and 24/7 service in a regulated environment where allergen control and special-meal compliance are mission-critical. Yet the legacy menu workflow, built around SACS, gategroup's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, required chefs and commercial teams to copy and paste menu details together from disparate sources because no unified workspace existed for menu creation.

Teams tracked recipes, cycles, classes, services, allergens, equipment requirements, and route assignments by hand in spreadsheets and documents. That made every menu a high-effort, error-prone exercise and pulled a significant share of chefs' time away from culinary craft.

Brief intake added friction of its own because airlines sent menu briefs as a mix of documents, emails, and file types, and teams had to read and re-key each one by hand. Airline customers, meanwhile, expected faster and more responsive proposals than a manual, document-driven workflow could reasonably support.

Different regions and accounts also followed their own variants of the process, which made it difficult to standardize governance and quality across gategroup's global footprint. Commercial leaders had no consolidated view of which menus were in progress, on track, blocked, or approaching airline proposal deadlines.

Manual tracking of allergen and special-meal requirements across documents created real compliance risk, and with chefs and commercial teams absorbed by process work, there was little room to try new menu approaches. The fragmented process also lacked the structured data and unified workspace that AI needs to add meaningful value to menu development.

The company needed a single platform that would return chefs' time to their craft and standardize menu development across geographies. It also needed AI built into the workflow in a way that protected the stability of a safety-critical operation.

Solution

Marlabs, gategroup's technology partner for over 18 years, began the engagement with deep discovery into how chefs and commercial teams actually worked before defining any technical scope. Delivery then moved into sprint-based development with continuous feedback from gategroup stakeholders, and AI went into the workflow at its highest-value points: brief intake, menu generation, menu suggestions, and issue detection. The team delivered the platform in four phases.

Design-Thinking Discovery and Change Plan

Marlabs held 1:1 interviews with gategroup's chefs, culinary leads, commercial owners, procurement, and leadership to surface real pain points and unmet needs. An in-person "Think" workshop aligned both organizations on outcomes, personas, jobs to be done, user journeys, and pain-point priorities. A follow-up "Make" workshop then defined the future-state experience and the platform capabilities it would require.

The team iterated on wireframes and clickable Figma prototypes in regular design reviews with select chef, commercial, and procurement stakeholders, who shaped the experience through persistent in-design comments. Because both organizations documented and agreed on the future state before anyone wrote code, sprint-based development started from a shared vision.

AI-Driven Brief Intake and Menu Generation

Users start a new project by uploading an airline brief in any of several file types. AI reads the brief and pre-fills the project details: contract type, proposal due date, lead chef, airline name, stations, applicable routes, classes and services, cuisine styles, allergens to avoid, special meal types, and meal guidance. Required field entry stays minimal, and users can open the original brief at any time to refine the extracted fields.

From those requirements, the platform generates a complete first-draft menu that spans every dish category, cycle, class, and service. That draft replaces the copy-paste assembly that once consumed chef and commercial time. Built-in AI detection flags potential allergen and special-meal issues, and every AI-generated menu remains subject to review and approval by gategroup's culinary and commercial teams.

Unified Workspace and Live Collaboration

The team built the workspace in sprints. GitHub Copilot supported AI-assisted coding, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and code review, and FigmaAI provided an augmented design system. Inside the workspace, chefs save changes as a new version or an entirely new menu, mark a version as ready, review the full change history, and print or download presentation-ready outputs. They can add collaborators with view or edit access, and the platform shows who's editing and prevents conflicting changes.

A menu table with status and class filters, search, hidden-column management, cycle-view limits, and Excel export handles complex menu data and different working styles. Expanding a dish reveals the equipment attached to its category, the loading ratio, the recipe, and the ingredients, and chefs can skip a cycle, add a category, or duplicate a previous dish to match how menu development actually works.

Governance Dashboards and Continuous Improvement

Marlabs added role-based dashboards for the groups that own each menu. The chef dashboard surfaces active menus; 'items needing attention by month-end; due date;, and the latest notifications, including AI suggestions populated on menus. The commercial dashboard shows leaders where every project stands, what needs attention, and what's on track. A built-in calendar ties events to projects, and an AI-aware notifications feed and in-app support tickets keep feedback flowing after launch.

The platform connects to SACS as the system of record, to Black Swan for passenger insight, and to gategroup's Snowflake data foundation for business-ready datasets. A monthly joint steering committee, a weekly demand council, and bi-weekly domain steward sessions govern how the platform evolves. That model gives gategroup a managed pipeline for new ideas and a foundation for future AI-enabled capabilities across menu development and operations.

Results

Menu development at gategroup now runs in a single, AI-enabled digital workspace in place of the legacy SACS-based workflow of copy-paste assembly and spreadsheet tracking. AI-driven brief intake and first-draft menu generation compress the time from inbound brief to presentation-ready menu. Chefs work in one workspace with version history, live collaboration, and role-based dashboards, and they spend less time assembling documents and more on culinary craft and the passenger experience.

Commercial leaders have enterprise-wide visibility into active menus for the first time, and standardized workflows and unified data models are replacing location-specific spreadsheets across gategroup's global footprint. Sprint-by-sprint delivery consistently earned positive feedback from gategroup's chefs, commercial teams, and leadership.

ISG recognized the engagement with the 2026 ISG Paragon Standout Award for Exceptional Individual Contribution in the Transformation category. The Paragon Awards honor client-validated case studies in the business services and technology sourcing industry, and the Transformation category recognizes the fundamental transformation of an organization or a key business function. The client must validate every nomination before ISG considers it, and gategroup validated this case study based on results its team experienced firsthand.

“Innovation cannot come at the cost of stability,” said Sandro Bregante, CIO of gategroup. “Marlabs has been a trusted technology partner for nearly two decades, bringing a deep understanding of our business and operational requirements. Their safety-first approach, built on clear governance, robust policies, appropriate guardrails, and human oversight, was exactly what we needed in a business where allergen control and special-meal compliance leave no room for error. By streamlining manual processes, the platform allows our teams to spend more time focusing on menu quality, culinary creativity and the passenger experience.”

Impact

The platform delivered operational and strategic benefits across gategroup's menu development function:

• Manual menu assembly replaced: A single AI-enabled digital workspace replaced the legacy spreadsheet-and-SACS workflow for menu development.

• Faster brief-to-menu turnaround: AI-driven intake and first-draft menu generation compress the time from inbound airline brief to presentation-ready menu.

• Chefs refocused on their craft: Chefs spend less time on document handling and more on culinary creativity, menu quality, and the passenger experience.

• Standardized global workflows: Unified data models and a consistent enterprise process are replacing location-specific spreadsheets and document variants across geographies.

• Enterprise-wide visibility: Role-based dashboards with explicit version control and change history give commercial leaders a consolidated view of active menus for the first time.

• Stronger compliance support: Built-in AI detection flags potential allergen and special-meal issues, and AI-generated menus remain subject to review and approval by culinary and commercial teams.

• Award-winning, client-validated transformation: The engagement won the 2026 ISG Paragon Standout Award for Exceptional Individual Contribution in the Transformation category.