Startup Pitched Emirates On Business Class Meal Preorders — New Lawsuit Says The Airline Stole The Tech

Emirates is being sued for stealing the technology behind passengers ordering their meals in advance of travel. Nourish Aviation Holdings LLC and Aviation Nutrition Network Investment Holdings Ltd. v. The Emirates Group, Emirates Airlines, and Dubai National Air Travel Agency was filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado for misappropriation of trade secrets. Nourish says it developed its meal booking platform for passengers to customize food requests. The valuable part isn’t choosing food (that’s been around for decades), it’s: Linking a passenger’s reservation or PNR data to a dynamic ordering system. Presenting menus and available products appropriate to the passenger and flight. Passing orders through the necessary food-production, airport, airline, and cabin-service workflow. Determining what must be prepared and loaded for each flight. Giving airline or cabin personnel the order information necessary to deliver the selected meal. Using advance demand data to reduce waste and improve product availability. That’s more than a fixed set of choices that are going to be on a flight anyway, which is what most airlines do, but doesn’t seem any more robust than what Singapore Airlines has done for years. However, they sent Emirates a “Joint Venture Proposal” in 2020 describing how the platform could operate with Emirates-owned dnata catering. They then had months of discussions, during which they say they disclosed confidential implementation information. Apparently Emirates had tried this on thier own earlier but struggled with the technology. The suit alleges Emirates couldn’t pull this off without stealing from them, that Emirates used the knowledge they’d gained exploring a partnership but then didn’t execute one. They introduced meal preordering in 2023. To succeed, the lawsuit – which was filed one day before the third anniversary of the July 18, 2023 Emirates announcement of preordering (to meet the statute of limitations) – needs to prove: That there was an actual trade secret here that wasn’t generally known Emirates acquired or used it in breach of a confidentiality duty The fact that Emirates hadn’t successfully pulled off meal preordering before meeting with this group helps their case. But it’s pretty de rigueur sort of stuff at this point. Singapore introduced pre-order meals in 1998. Given prevalence in the industry it’s not unreasonable to think that Emirates maanged to develop their system independently. And the Emirates offering is still a limited business class meal selection feature, not a broader paid marketplace or gate delivery system that this company seemed to have been selling. It seems odd to file in Colorado where the plaintiff has an LLC, when Emirates is in Dubai, meetings didn’t take place in Colorado, and Emirates doesn’t serve Denver, though the airport said this was coming. Topics on this page