Let’s set the scene. You’re travelling on an overnight flight. After hours of restless, neck-pain-inducing sleep in Economy, the sun rises and breakfast service begins. The cabin begins to fill with the smell of sausages, hash brown, eggs and coffee, and your stomach begins to grumble. 

When the flight attendant finally reaches your seat you select your hot beverage of choice and which meal you’d like. You opt for eggs, but to your stomach’s disappointment, eggs are not what you get. Instead, in your little plastic tray sits a sad lump of scrambled yellow-ish food that tastes nothing like egg. Admitting defeat, you reseal the tray, consume the fruit sitting in its own little ramekin and the half-stale pastry you’ve been served and listen to your stomach grumble until you land.

But this isn’t the case when you fly with Singapore Airlines. 

Related story: Love food? Singapore Airlines’ new Premium Economy is perfect for you 

The flag carrying airline is big on ensuring its customers, from First Class through to Economy, are served a good meal. So much so that the airline hand-makes 8,000 omelettes a day for its inflight meals. Yes, you read that right: 8,000!

Singapore Airlines catering partner and facility, SATS, actually produces more than 50,000 meals a day to service the airline’s passengers. But it’s dedication to hand making each omelette is impressive. 

So, how do they do it? There is a dedicated omelette making station that includes a large rotating table. On that rotating table are 15 electric hot plates that a small frying pan sits on top of. At one end of the table, a pump hovers above the rotating pans and squirts out 110g of fresh egg mixture (egg, milk, salt and pepper) into a pan. Chefs around the table spin each pan ten times, so each omelette is spinned a total of 20 times. Then another chef quickly folds the cooked omelette and places it on a tray. 

The whole process takes around one minute and 30 seconds to cook 60 omelettes. The rotating table does not stop moving and the second an omelette is removed from the pan, the pump quickly squirts fresh egg mixture back into it so the process repeats itself all over again.

Because of the sheer volume of omelettes cooked per day, each week the frying pans used on the table are thrown out as the teflon non-stick coating on them has completely worn off. 

So there you have it yolks, that’s how Singapore Airlines makes 8,000 omelettes. 

Related story: The best plane snacks to pack for your next flight