Airport Experience® News - Food & Beverage Issue 2023

Far Left: Breeze, a ghost kitchen offering primarily healthier food options via the Delta Terminal at LAX, hopes to expand at LAX and to other airports. Left: Passengers can use their smart phones to order healthy options from Breeze and pick them up on their way to the gate.

find a coffee partner to help offset the long lines at Starbucks. “Now instead of getting your latte in 45 minutes, you could get it in six minutes from us,” she says. Plans For Growth Lawee maintains that any airport could use a concept like Breeze, which takes up little space, offers a fast alternative to waiting in lines and is convenient, particularly for tech-savvy travelers. One of the people Lawee met at her first industry conference was Greg Plummer, CEO of the Eat Enjoy Repeat. He admired her enthusiasm and tried to encourage and educate her about the industry. In fact, Plummer has agreed to acquire Breeze, pending approval from the airport and URW, with the intention of first expanding it to additional terminals at LAX and then to other airports around the country. “She was passionate about this type of food and having seen that there is a gap when you look at healthy food offerings, it just made a lot of sense,” he says. “I just wanted to help her realize her vision.” He called Breeze a platform that airports can tailor to fit their needs in this area. “We always have a base or foundation for what Breeze is going to be, but the ability to add new things that fulfill needs … we can do that through our technology, through the platform,” he says. “We can offer something other companies can’t because we’re not a traditional restaurant.” He did not commit to a timeframe, but says they’ve had discussions with officials from LAX and other airports about adding locations.

Annabel Lawee was working a business development job several years ago that had her traveling regularly between New York and Bentonville, AR. She has celiac disease and can’t eat gluten, which she found to be a struggle at airports. “I would either overdose on almonds or whatever I could find that didn’t have gluten or I would land feeling hangry and annoyed and starving before my meeting,” she says. The more she talked about it with people, the more she found her thoughts resonating. So, in December 2018, she quit her job, drew up a pitch deck talking about how airport food is lacking, created a concept that included several gluten free food options, found some investors and headed to the Airport Experience Conference. Not An Easy Start She didn’t have a team in place or an airport waiting to open her concept and she recalls a lot of skepticism at the time. But she also met some people who admired her enthusiasm and shared her sentiment that airports need healthier offerings.

And a year later, in December of 2019, she launched Breeze, a ghost kitchen of fering online ordering and pickup operating out of one kitchen, in the Delta Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) . “We did a lot of research and development and we launched with a very simple yet healthy menu,” she says. “We were starting to do really well for three months and then COVID shut us down.” While initially Breeze took a hit, COVID also accelerated the opportunity for ghost kitchens, Lawee says. “No one wanted to touch anything,” she says. “No one wanted to wait in line.” COVID also prompted a couple of tweaks. Lawee changed the menu to include comfort food items people were craving, like bagels and cream cheese or quesadillas. As the industry recovers from the impact of the pandemic, Breeze has retained some of those items but brought back some healthy options too, with plans to maintain a hybrid menu going forward. Breeze, at the request of Unibail Rodamco-Westfield (URW), hustled to

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