Salmon bathes in chardonnay with caramelized onions on rye, creamy herbed goat cheese on dark pumpernickel, tenderloin of beef with a blue cheese spread on crusted crostini - sound good? These are just a few of the appetizer samplings for Northwest Airlines premium-class service in 2008.

Northwest’s corporate chef Jo Ragozzino spends almost a full year searching, developing, testing and selecting foods to serve passengers for the upcoming 12 months. Ragozzino and her team, working with a bevy of high-end consultant chefs, search throughout the world for high-quality products that will translate well to airline service.

Northwest Airlines is one of the few domestic airlines to employ its own corporate chef and has done so for over two decades. Coming from the restaurant industry, Ragozzino says there is a huge difference between serving up a delicious meal in a restaurant and delivering it on board an aircraft. “In a restaurant, you create, you test, you cook and you serve immediately,” says Ragozzino. “But in the airline food world, the creative work is only the beginning.”

Once developed, appetizers, entrees and other food items have to created and loaded on to serving trays and into meal carts. The carts are then held at the appropriate temperature and then transported to airplane galleys for final presentation to passengers. Each item has to be prepared allowing for 12 to 16 hours of holding time - for hundreds of flights every day.

One of this year consulting chefs for Northwest is Jim Maxwell from Sid Wainer & Son, a well-known East Coast importer and distributor of specialty produce and specialty foods to fine restaurants.

“Serving tasty and high-quality food at 35,000 feet is complicated just by being up in the air. The atmosphere is so much drier than on land and flavors flatten out; you have to allow for those taste changes,” says Maxwell.

Ragozzino proudly states the Northwest uses absolutely no preservatives in its food preparation, concentrating rather on obtaining and using the freshest possible ingredients.

For each meal segment, Ragozzino and her team of chefs present extensive “tasting sessions” for top Northwest Airlines executives, setting up individual sessions each for appetizers and spreads, salads, entrees (usually two or more choices on every flight), cheese selections and desserts. In early November, MARQ attended an initial tasting for the appetizers segment. During the two-hour session, chefs presented 80 different choices of appetizers. The NWA executives tasted and chose, attaching colored dots to their favorites. Out of those 80 appetizers the list of favorites was narrowed again and again, down to eight appetizer selections - two for each quarter, beginning in March 2008.

Ragozzino also notes that even once the final choices are made, she keeps tweaking based on passenger and flight attendant input.

“I defiantly feel creatively challenged,” she says. “I love the job and working with others at Northwest and in the industry. I do think finally, that it all comes down to using quality products; I use the freshest quality possible, just as I did in the restaurant world.”