Airport Experience® News - Food & Beverage Issue 2025

DIRECTOR’S CHAIR

Left, below: HMSHost has the contract for F&B at JAX. An RFP for additional concessions for the new concourse will be released soon.

WARD: Many airports have taken a local focus in the past several years. Are you doing that as well? GERRETY: It has been for us – we’ve done a lot of local and I feel like we’ve got a good local presence. I think a healthy balance is appropriate for these quick-serve spaces. It would be nice to see some national brands to kind of balance and round out the program. For the fine dining, I don’t really know yet. We’re going to be seeking interest. We want to make sure we don’t cannibalize or compete with other concepts. WARD: And all three RFPS will be out by the fall? GERRETY: Probably. We’d like to take them to our board for approval by the end of the year and then allow the concessionaire to get in and start designing and developing that space, running on parallel tracks with us while we’re building out the [concourse]. WARD: Have you had, or are you anticipating, disruption to your current operations? VANLOH: We did have to close a little food area hall where the new concourse is going right through. We’ve had to move some options around for travelers, but we’ve given them plenty of options on the other concourses GERRETY: We’ve been really lenient with the concessionaire, allowing them to place popups in front and expand their offerings because we’d rather have something than nothing. WARD: What else is happening at Jacksonville? VANLOH: We’ve got three other airports we’re dealing with so it’s always something. At our other airport, the former Navy Air Base, we

just completed the Boeing campus a couple of years ago and they’re already expanding. We have another announcement coming up on a new manufacturing tenant. People are moving to Florida and companies are moving to Florida, especially to take advantage of the taxes, and then we’ll see where the tariffs go. WARD: What’s the latest with the spaceport? VANLOH: There are a lot of things happening down at Cape Canaveral [with actual launches]. In terms of what’s happening at Cecil, we brought in a company called Hermeus. They are testing and building a hypersonic engine for the military. And they’ve already fired it up and tested it, and it will eventually be on aircraft that we fly in,

getting us to London in three hours. So that’s all happening at the Spaceport. And then we also have all the local colleges, Emory Riddle, University of Florida, Florida State University – theirr students are bringing rocket engines that they built to test at the space center. It’s so much fun to watch these students putting together this rocket and then firing it up and celebrating. In the future, we may not have the rockets that take off like those at Cape Canaveral, but we will have the parts and assemblies in the clean rooms and the experiments that are being assembled in Jacksonville and then sent down to be put on a rocket to the moon or Mars or somewhere else. So we will be part of it.

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AX NEWS JULY/AUGUST 2025