News

AirAsia brings fast food restaurant brand down to earth

February 20, 2019

As if the competition on land wasn't already high for QSRs, now one of the latest competitors in the fast food chain game has literally fallen from the sky in the form of a new concept from AirAsia that will bring the airline's flight food to ground-based customers. 

CEO Tony Fernandes told Skift that the concept will first launch as the ground-based restaurant, Santan, which is Malay for coconut milk, a key ingredient in Southeast Asian food and the name of AirAsia's inflight menu. The first earthbound brick-and-mortar executions of the brand will pop up in Malaysia, where it will serve the carrier's inflight dishes.

Dishes on the inflight menu for AirAsia include Southeast Asian comfort food like the coconut rice-and-chili-paste dish, Pak Nasser's Nasi Lemak, and hot, spicy chicken tenders called Bukhara Chicken Biryani. But the airline itself has not released any details of the new fast-food brand yet. Skift reported the story after hearing Air Asia's CEO discussing the new brand on Larry King Live, then talking to him about the news. 

Still, information about the brand's launch date, city and number of locations, has yet to be released.