Workers inside a Los Angeles International Airport catering plant say they found decomposing food covered in mold, flies and maggots sitting inside airline dish carts, along with cockroaches crawling through food prep areas, employee changing stations and the staff cafeteria. The allegations, laid out in a new safety complaint against Flying Food Group, describe a dish room so hot and humid that one coworker nearly fainted and a supervisor who allegedly told a worker to wash the contaminated dishes rather than throw them out because they were needed for an upcoming flight.
The complaint was filed by UNITE HERE Local 11 with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, according to the New York Post. The union, which represents more than 32,000 hospitality workers across Southern California and Arizona, submitted photographs, videos and worker testimony to Cal/OSHA and is calling for an expedited on-site inspection. Per the Post's report, the union alleges Flying Food Group employees were forced to work in unsanitary conditions that put their health at risk.
One worker told investigators she suffered stomach pain, a headache and a strange sensation in her nose after handling noxious material on the job, the outlet reports. A longtime employee said the heat and humidity in the dish room regularly led to fatigue, dehydration and headaches. Bathrooms and handwashing stations reportedly ran out of soap or paper towels frequently, forcing employees to search elsewhere for supplies before returning to food preparation duties, and the company did not provide the affected worker with a mask or respirator, according to the complaint.
A Pattern Regulators Have Flagged Before
Sunan Minato, one of the workers who came forward, described the scene bluntly: the facility had an unbelievable amount of mold and was disgusting. Workers say they repeatedly saw cockroaches and other vermin throughout the facility, from food prep stations to the employee cafeteria, according to the complaint cited by the Post.
The June complaint follows a Cal/OSHA inspection that had already resulted in six citations against Flying Food Group in May, four of them classified as serious. According to a complaint document reviewed by UNITE HERE Local 11, those citations, totaling $74,000 in proposed penalties, covered two LAX-serving facilities on Imperial Highway and Hillcrest Boulevard and centered on hazardous cold storage doors and unguarded machinery. Union officials say Flying Food Group's LAX operations have a long record of alleged safety violations.
That record includes an earlier entrapment scare. During a kitchen fire this past January, two Flying Food Group workers were trapped inside a walk-in cooler for 10 to 15 minutes because the exterior entrance door had been chained shut from the outside, forcing over 300 employees to evacuate while the trapped pair banged on the door for help, according to The San Francisco Standard. The union notes it echoes a hazard the company was cited for years earlier: in August 2023, Cal/OSHA cited Flying Food Group for six violations, including bolting an emergency exit shut from the outside on the day of a planned union picket line, a case the company contested for more than two years before agreeing to a settlement affirming the violations in February.
Growing Municipal and City Scrutiny
The safety complaints have coincided with mounting pressure from Los Angeles city government. The City of Los Angeles has launched an investigation into Flying Food Group's safety and labor practices, according to the Post's report citing KTLA. Mayor Karen Bass's office said the mayor takes the allegations about the airport contractor seriously and is engaged with UNITE HERE Local 11 and Los Angeles World Airports.
That municipal engagement has already produced consequences. LAWA placed Flying Food Group on administrative probation in July, granting only a six-month conditional operating license through the end of the year rather than the standard five-year permit, citing ongoing labor and safety noncompliance, per the union's tracking page. Separately, amid an ongoing city investigation into Living Wage Law compliance, Flying Food Group began taking steps in July to repay dozens of LAX workers for unpaid healthcare benefits, the union says.
The company's regulatory footprint extends beyond Cal/OSHA and city contracting offices. Before this complaint, Flying Food Group had been cited or investigated by at least five different government agencies, including six minimum wage citations from the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Contract Administration and five public safety citations from the California Highway Patrol, according to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. Federal scrutiny of the same LAX facility dates back further still: FDA inspection records from January 2015, obtained through a union FOIA request, previously found improper food holding temperatures and dirty sanitizing equipment there, according to Food Safety News.
International Airlines Rely on the Same Kitchen
Flying Food Group supplies in-flight meals for dozens of domestic and international airlines, and its LAX facility prepares food specifically for carriers including Lufthansa, Air France, Singapore Airlines, Japan Airlines, ANA, SWISS, Virgin Atlantic and Qantas. That global reach has drawn attention overseas: an independent labor report co-authored by former International Labor Organization Deputy Director-General Deborah Greenfield found in May that Flying Food Group violated core international labor standards, prompting European aviation trade unions to demand accountability from carriers using the vendor, per the European Transport Workers' Federation.
The allegations echo testimony an eight-year Flying Food Group dishwasher gave during public Truth Commission hearings in April, in which she described suffering chemical eye burns from bleach water after the facility's designated eyewash station was blocked by flight carts and lacked required irrigation fluid; she said a supervisor instructed her to rinse her eyes in a restroom instead. This complaint arrives less than a year after hundreds of workers protested outside LAX over the same safety concerns, and union officials say the June discovery of moldy, insect-infested dish carts shows those warnings went unheeded even as regulators piled up citations against the company.
