In October 2024, a charter broker was quoted $177.05 for a single chicken sandwich box out of Jackson Hole. The food, the airport fee and the tax came to $77.05. The remaining $100 was a service charge.
A charter broker at Ironbird Partners posted a catering quote on LinkedIn as a poll: what did a grilled chicken sandwich box cost on a flight departing Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Options ran from $110 to $298. Only 27% of respondents picked the right figure, $177.05.
The breakdown, published afterwards, split cleanly. $77.05 covered the sandwich, the airport fee and tax. $100 was a separate service charge. There were no delivery or set-up charges on top.
The post drew hundreds of responses from operators and brokers posting their own receipts: $373 for breakfast for three, $427 for fruit for six.
The company that handled the order described the $100 as a service fee covering sourcing and coordination. It was not on the original quote as its own line. It surfaced only because someone asked, and only after the invoice became public.
Worth separating from the outrage: the fee itself is not the problem. Someone takes the order, finds a kitchen that can deliver to that ramp at that hour, confirms timing against the schedule, and carries the risk if it arrives late. That work has a price.
The problem is where the price sits. An intermediary has three options, and only three.
The buyer sees the coordination cost and the food cost separately, and can check either one against the market. This is the case that produced the $177.05 screenshot.
The quote shows one number. There is no fee to object to because there is no fee shown. The only way to detect it is to obtain the kitchen's own menu and compare, which almost nobody does mid-trip.
The buyer is told the service costs nothing. The kitchen pays a commission on each order and prices it into its menu. The buyer pays the same money, one step removed, and has no line to question.
The second and third are more common than the first. That is the uncomfortable conclusion of this story: the $177.05 invoice is the best-documented case in the industry precisely because the fee was findable. The quotes worth worrying about are the ones where it isn't.
$100
of the $177.05 total, 56% of the invoice. The only reason it can be discussed is that it appeared as its own line.
Operators responded to the post in numbers that surprised the trade press. The pattern in the responses was not that catering is expensive. It was that nobody could see what they were paying for.
Operators price fuel to the cent and negotiate handling line by line. On catering they are handed one number and asked to accept it.
"Always underwhelming and insanely overpriced." Julien Vernet, COO, Jet The World
Harris did not pay the $177.05. He called a restaurant near the field, arranged a delivery service, and got a comparable meal for $67.
That is a useful figure, but it is not a solution. Sourcing a meal that way takes local knowledge of the field, time on the day of the flight, and a delivery arrangement that clears the ramp. A dispatcher covering fifteen legs cannot do it fifteen times. What the $67 shows is the size of the gap, not a working alternative.
Ask for the coordination cost as a separate line before confirming, not after. If the answer is that there is no coordination cost, ask who pays for the coordination. The work still happened.
Ask whether the fee is fixed or a percentage, and whether it moves with order size. A percentage on a $2,000 order behaves very differently from the same percentage on a $77 one.
Ask for the kitchen's own menu price. Any intermediary that cannot show it is asking to be trusted on the one number you cannot check.
Skystar answers all three before the order. Supplier cost is passed through unchanged, the coordination fee is printed as its own line, and the fee schedule is published on the site rather than quoted on request. It is not the cheapest possible arrangement. It is the one where the arithmetic is available to the buyer.
Compare the quote against the kitchen's own menu price for the same items. If the intermediary will not provide that figure, the markup cannot be measured from the quote alone.
Placing and confirming the order, matching delivery timing to the ramp schedule, handling substitutions, and carrying responsibility if the delivery is late or wrong. It should not cover the food, which is a separate cost.
Not usually. Where the buyer pays no fee, the intermediary is generally compensated by the kitchen, and that commission is reflected in the menu prices the buyer sees.
The coordination cost as its own line, whether it is fixed or a percentage, and the kitchen's own menu price for the same items.
Sources
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