Editor’s Note: In the airport food and beverage world, chefs and culinary executives are constantly tracking emerging dining trends, evolving consumer preferences, and operational challenges, all with an eye toward elevating the traveler experience. For the July/August issue of Airport Experience News, AXN’s Sally Kral connected with culinary leaders from some of North America’s top airport food and beverage concessionaires to get their insights on the latest developments.
Alongside the feature story in the magazine, Kral asked each leader a series of additional questions. In the fifth and final installment of this web-exclusive Q&A series, Kral spoke with Sal Mendola, director of culinary and concept development at Areas USA.
To read the full feature on the industry’s leading culinary directors, log in, subscribe, or check out the July/August print edition of Airport Experience News.
Kral: What’s your hospitality background and how did you get into the airport industry?
Mendola: I started out cooking at plenty of streetside restaurants and worked my way up in my career as a chef before I was given a really fantastic opportunity to reimagine, so to speak, how airport food takes shape from both a hospitality standpoint as well as menu development and innovation. I joined Areas in 2021 at the time as director of brands and concept development and since then moved into my current role as senior director of culinary and concept development. So I really just learned my way around kitchens, went the traditional route of culinary school. I got really excited about the idea of producing in a very heavy-volume environment and being able to give a taste of the city to anyone coming through an airport, and that ability to create a true sense of place and get people excited about food that I think for a long time didn’t have the strength that it has now—that was a really exciting factor for me joining this industry.
Kral: What are some of the biggest food and beverage trends in airports right now?
Mendolda: I think with the new dietary guidelines that have been released, people are looking for protein. And you see it everywhere – you even see even Twix bars with protein at this point, which is kind of funny. But we have seen a great uptick in these kinds of sells. A great example is in Buffalo [Niagara International] Airport, where we worked with a local farm called Elmhurst that makes these great protein shakes. We introduced it into the program, and they’ve been selling left and right because they come with about triple the protein that you would get from a standard dairy-based drink.
We’re seeing the Mediterranean diet make a comeback as well, and non-alcoholic solutions is such a big trend. We had some interesting data that we came across recently that says 49% of Millennials and 61% of Gen Z are drinking less because they’re focused on their mental health. So, as travelers are going through the airport, we need to have options, whether it’s a really, really delicious mocktail or it’s an alcohol-free beer, that part of the population is continuing to grow and it’s only going to become more and more prevalent.
Another big one is global cuisines. Filipino cuisine has emerged and just gotten really, really hot and popular, especially sisig; Korean food continues to get bigger and bigger; Vietnamese too. This is cuisine that may not have been approachable, 10, 15, even five or six years ago and are now household names. Even with gochujang, which not long ago would’ve been hidden in an aisle, now there’s five or six different versions of it right in the front, and people are getting it and using it in different combinations. So global cuisine is certainly hot right now.
Kral: What’s your approach to menu evolution to keep up with trends?
Mendola: We’re based in Barcelona, Spain, and we have tons of different restaurants that we do throughout Europe and Central America and South America. What’s so wonderful about that is the ability to collaborate with our chefs that are over in Europe who saw this trend two years ago or three years ago. They can tell us, “hey, this worked and this didn’t work,” or “this didn’t work with a certain demographic or a certain consumer,” or “we saw a lot of success by using this, this and this.” So we have a nice little sample size that shows us what’s been successful and what we may want to introduce into the American market and see how it performs. A lot of it for us is just really ensuring that we have tried-and-true concepts, but it’s also okay to take swings and run a limited time offer and see how successful something may be. With some items, maybe it’s going to take another six months for it to hit that maturation point in the trend life cycle and then it’s going to work. It’s certainly all about timing and seeing what’s working and using data-driven solutions to ensure that everything that we want to introduce has a fighting chance.
And then also, we know that our guests are always going to come back to certain items, whether that’s the burger or the chicken sandwich or the slice of pizza. The onus is on us to take those items and put a little twist on them—make it still totally approachable but embrace that trend and add plum sauce to it at the end, add something that just gives it that little touch that makes it special and unique.
