Several days ago, United introduced new meal management program for all flights.  This was done to "better manage meal counts and avoid excess waste."  On international flights, Onboard Service will establish a "meal bank," and on domestic flights, there will be new alternate standby meals and procedures.

Here's how this new process will work on international flights:

• Approximately six hours before departure, the kitchen receives the final meal count, and the chef prepares them.
• Based on the particular flight's historical no-show factor, the caterer reserves a percentage of the meals.  Those meals are deposited into a 'bank', not in the First Savings and Loan, but probably into a refrigerator held at the kitchen or standby facility.
• 'Ideally' 45 minutes, but not less than 30 minutes, before departure, Customer Service provides a final passenger count to the caterer, at which time the caterer can draw on the meals reserved in the 'bank' if necessary.

On domestic flights, the process will forecast meals based on passenger load and provide standard alternate meals for last-minute adjustments.  Alternate meals?  Yep.  Those will be designated standard entrees for each type of meal service, including breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.

So what happens if you still have more passengers than meals?  The answer:

"On both U.S. domestic and international flights, if the final passenger count exceeds the original meal order count and the meal bank is depleted, Customer Service will work with the kitchen and Operations to determine the feasibility and logistics of producing and delivering meals for the additional passengers."

We had a situation happen on one of my flights where we had about 15 more passengers than meals for our dinner service.  We knew about this during boarding and called catering to request 15 additional hot dinners.  Time went by, tick-tock, and it was getting close to departure time, but the captain forced them to wait for the meals. The caterer finally came on with 15 snack boxes.  Now you see kids, there's a big difference between a little blue box with cold sandwich/chips/candy bar and a nice hot entree dinner.  Since we had no NRSA passengers on board, the captain decided that one of the following actions had to be taken: They could choose and inform us of the specific passengers that would be receiving the snack boxes instead of the dinner entrees before we would depart from the gate, as well as make those specific passengers aware they would be getting a snack box instead of a dinner.  Or... They could bring us what we originally requested, namely, dinner entrees, so that we could provide the originally promised level of service to everyone. But we got the 15 dinner entrees brought to us.

One other thing:  United employees can help with the meal count, and thus cost-control efforts by listing only once for a specific flight and only once per each destination on a given day.