Emirates is being sued for stealing the technology behind passengers ordering their meals in advance of travel. Nourish Aviation Holdings LLC and Aviation Nutrition Network Investment Holdings Ltd. v. The Emirates Group, Emirates Airlines, and Dubai National Air Travel Agency was filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado for misappropriation of trade secrets.
Nourish says it developed its meal booking platform for passengers to customize food requests. The valuable part isn’t choosing food (that’s been around for decades), it’s:
- Linking a passenger’s reservation or PNR data to a dynamic ordering system.
- Presenting menus and available products appropriate to the passenger and flight.
- Passing orders through the necessary food-production, airport, airline, and cabin-service workflow.
- Determining what must be prepared and loaded for each flight.
- Giving airline or cabin personnel the order information necessary to deliver the selected meal.
- Using advance demand data to reduce waste and improve product availability.
That’s more than a fixed set of choices that are going to be on a flight anyway, which is what most airlines do, but doesn’t seem any more robust than what Singapore Airlines has done for years. However, they sent Emirates a “Joint Venture Proposal” in 2020 describing how the platform could operate with Emirates-owned dnata catering. They then had months of discussions, during which they say they disclosed confidential implementation information.
Apparently Emirates had tried this on thier own earlier but struggled with the technology. The suit alleges Emirates couldn’t pull this off without stealing from them, that Emirates used the knowledge they’d gained exploring a partnership but then didn’t execute one. They introduced meal preordering in 2023.
To succeed, the lawsuit – which was filed one day before the third anniversary of the July 18, 2023 Emirates announcement of preordering (to meet the statute of limitations) – needs to prove:
- That there was an actual trade secret here that wasn’t generally known
- Emirates acquired or used it in breach of a confidentiality duty
The fact that Emirates hadn’t successfully pulled off meal preordering before meeting with this group helps their case. But it’s pretty de rigueur sort of stuff at this point. Singapore introduced pre-order meals in 1998. Given prevalence in the industry it’s not unreasonable to think that Emirates maanged to develop their system independently. And the Emirates offering is still a limited business class meal selection feature, not a broader paid marketplace or gate delivery system that this company seemed to have been selling.
It seems odd to file in Colorado where the plaintiff has an LLC, when Emirates is in Dubai, meetings didn’t take place in Colorado, and Emirates doesn’t serve Denver, though the airport said this was coming.
Online food ordering?
Nobody has EVER thought of that before.
Nothing proprietary here. Massive prior art. Case dismissed.
Weak case. Wise attorney would’ve demanded to be paid up-front for this one.
Groping in the dark.
“Apparently Emirates had tried this on thier own earlier but struggled with the technology”
That right there is the entire interesting story. It’s a WTF moment and deserves a deeper dive.
The problem isn’t hard in the software development sense, it’s hard because you need to integrate with a bunch of providers all of whom have their own way of looking at the world. But that should be the kind of thing that an airline software group deals with ten times a day before their first cup of coffee.
@Gary – Do you truly think that almost any case from a foreign company has a viable chance against a Dubai company in a Dubai court? Honestly?
Reveal a trade secret to me, I should get to use it any way I want. If we signed a contract on this issue, then you can sue me for breach of contract. There is inside information we don’t know, but I find far too many people think up a not-so-novel idea and think nobody should get to do anything like it. Far too frequently, they get a patent on the non-novel idea and become a patent troll.
@This comes to mind — Actually, under DTSA (laws governing trade secrets), you can be sued for what they call ‘misappropriation’ even without a contract, if you acquire the ‘secret’ through ‘improper means’ or violate an ‘implied duty of confidentiality.’ Umm, Bing! it if you want more deets.