The Vision Behind CatCal
CATCAL (Catering Calculations) was built on a simple but powerful vision: to bring years of real-world airline catering experience — gained across different airlines, countries, hubs, customers, and operational environments — together under one intelligent system.
CatCal is not simply a software application. It is designed as a true Airline Catering Operations Management Platform — a system that transforms the complexity of daily catering operations into measurable data, structured processes, real-time visibility, and actionable operational intelligence.
For decades, many airline catering operations have relied heavily on manual processes, individual experience, spreadsheets, phone calls, messages, and human judgment to coordinate thousands of operational details every day. CATCAL was created to bring those processes together, convert operational activity into measurable data, and give managers the ability to filter, analyze, and process that data in real time — helping them make faster, more informed decisions and operate more efficiently.
Experience Is the Recipe
A great recipe cannot be created by someone who has only read a cookbook. It is created by a chef who has spent years in real kitchens, understands ingredients, timing, pressure, quality, and the consequences of every decision. CATCAL follows the same philosophy.
Its founder, Onur Oğuz, has spent many years managing airline catering operations across three continents and seven countries, including large airline hubs and highly critical VIP and high-profile catering environments — from production planning and inventory management to flight preparation, quality control, deadlines, and aircraft delivery. CATCAL is, in many ways, the digital expression of that operational experience — a continuously evolving operational "recipe book" built from real-world knowledge and transformed into a measurable, scalable system.
Born Inside a Live Airline Catering Operation
Many software platforms are created by technology companies and then adapted to an industry based on information provided by consultants or subject-matter experts — the software team builds the technology, and the industry professionals explain the operation. CATCAL was developed differently.
It was built, tested, and continuously refined inside a live airline catering operation at one of the largest aviation hubs in the United States. This means CATCAL has not been designed around assumptions about how a flight kitchen works — it has been developed by people who actually work within the operation, understand its pressures, experience its problems, and use the system in real time. The result is a platform that understands the operational reality, not simply the terminology.
Today, CATCAL supports the daily management of a 750-person catering facility handling more than 400 flights a day — and since its implementation, the hub's operational performance has grown threefold. These are not projected numbers. This is a system running inside a real, high-volume U.S. airline catering operation, every day.
Managing the Journey From Receiving to Aircraft
CATCAL is designed to provide visibility and operational control across the complete airline catering journey. From the moment products are received into the facility, through inventory and production processes, equipment and beverage preparation, final assembly, quality control, flight readiness, and ultimately the loading and securing of catering equipment and trolleys inside the aircraft galley — CATCAL brings the critical operational steps together within a single platform. Each department can have its own operational dashboard, while management can access consolidated information across the entire operation, with accumulated data transformed into monthly KPI reports to identify trends and drive continuous improvement.
From Data to Decisions
CATCAL does not simply collect data — it turns operational input into information that managers can act upon. Every department contributes operational data to the system; CATCAL processes that information mathematically and evaluates it against critical flight deadlines, customer requirements, operational milestones, and service standards. This allows management to see not only what has happened, but also what is happening now, what is at risk, and where attention may be required.
When a potential operational risk is identified, CATCAL provides real-time visibility to the responsible managers and supports them with structured, professional operational recommendations. The objective is simple: identify the risk before it becomes a delay.
Technology Alone Does Not Run an Operation
CATCAL is powerful, but it is not designed to replace the people who operate an airline catering facility — a system cannot manage an operation by itself. The quality of the information produced by any operational platform ultimately depends on the discipline, accuracy, and consistency of the people using it. When employees are properly trained and disciplined in using the system, CATCAL creates something much more powerful than software: a common operational language across the entire facility — so managers can see the operation through measurable data, rather than relying solely on individual conversations and assumptions.
Built to Adapt — Not to Restrict
Every airline catering facility is different. Different airlines have different service standards, different customers have different requirements, and different facilities have different production structures, equipment, staffing models, workflows, and operational challenges. CATCAL is therefore not designed to force every facility into the same operational model — its workflows, dashboards, KPIs, operational rules, alerts, and reporting structures are tailored to the specific requirements of each airline catering operation and the airlines it serves.
"Just as every kitchen has its own recipe, every airline catering operation has its own operational structure. CATCAL is not designed to force facilities into a generic system. It is designed to understand how each operation works and create tailored solutions around its customers, service standards, operational requirements, and production workflows."
More Than Software
CATCAL represents the combination of three elements: Experience provides the operational knowledge, Data provides measurable visibility, and Technology connects the two and turns them into actionable intelligence. As an airline catering technology built from real operational practice, CATCAL is designed to reflect how flight kitchens actually work — not how a generic software team assumes they work.
The ultimate goal of CATCAL is not simply to digitize airline catering operations — it is to help transform them into more measurable, more predictable, more transparent, and more efficient operations, while giving managers the information they need to make better decisions, faster. Because in airline catering, thousands of individual actions ultimately lead to one critical objective: the right product, prepared to the right standard, delivered to the right aircraft, at the right time. CATCAL was built to help make that happen.
