AirAsia today hosted the Santan Food Festival, the largest inflight food tasting event in Asia, featuring meals from across the region.

The event showcased the gastronomical delights of Santan hot meals from across AirAsia's network, including the latest signature dish, Thai Green Curry with Rice, an aromatic chicken curry infused with authentic Thai spices served with fluffy fragrant white rice.

AirAsia Group CEO Tan Sri Tony Fernandes said, "Food is a great unifying factor across the region. What we are doing is bringing the wonderful flavours of Asean into Santan to create a unique food experience, with the vision of replicating the on-ground gourmet experience onboard. The flavour profile and pricing of inflight food has always been a challenge but we believe that with Santan, we can create the first restaurant brand in the sky that is both tasty and affordable."

He added: "In line with our digitalisation efforts, we will leverage on data we have from more than 400 million guests carried over the years to create better, more innovative inflight offerings, including for Santan. We will implement an electronic point of sales (ePOS) system soon that will make ordering and payment as easy as a restaurant and allow us to better understand what our guests want. We are also exploring the use of green packaging and inflight coffee trolleys to enable us to serve freshly brewed premium coffee onboard, and we will continue working with local Asean enterprises and farmers in developing F&B products."

The Santan Food Festival was attended by more than 200 members of the media and key influencers from 16 markets - Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Brunei, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and India.

Attendees took part in the Santan food tasting session and interactive activities, including a cooking demo of the Thai Green Curry with Rice meal by AirAsia Regional Manager of Group Inflight F&B Chef Calvin Soo, a performance by AirAsia X cabin crew, Assraf Nasir, and more.

AirAsia's award-winning Santan menu offers the most extensive variety of inflight meals for guests to choose from both onboard and via online pre-booking. These include tantalising hot meals, kids meals, savoury snacks, healthier selections such as wraps and sandwiches and local desserts personalised to suit the preferences of guests travelling across AirAsia's extensive route network.

Guests are encouraged to pre-book their meals to enjoy greater savings with the Santan Combo Meal and to choose from a wider variety of meals. Guests who pre-book will be assured of meal availability and will enjoy priority meal service onboard.

AirAsia won the World's Leading Inflight Service title at the World Travel Awards Grand Finals in December 2016, and was also honoured with the Catering Innovation of the Year award by Onboard Hospitality earlier last year.

Follow the AirAsia Santan journey through the hashtag #AirAsiaSantan and #SantanFoodFest or the latest AirAsia news, activities and promotions on Twitter (twitter.com/AirAsia) and Facebook (facebook.com/AirAsia).