United Airlines is piloting app-based gate ordering for food, drinks and travel essentials at up to nine gates in Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal C, with Chief Customer Officer David Kinzelman framing it as a way to cut “friction” for connecting passengers before boarding.
United is piloting app-based gate ordering for food, drinks and travel essentials at up to nine gates in Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal C, according to an announcement reported by Future Travel Experience. Customers get a pre-departure push notification through the United app or by email, choose from sandwiches, salads, drinks, children’s meals, snacks, over-the-counter medicine, travel pillows and charging cords, and collect the order from a pick-up shelf at the gate before boarding.
The trial covers gates serving both narrow-body and wide-body departures, domestic and international, at what United describes as a high-volume connecting hub where the gap between arriving at the gate and boarding can be short. Food preparation and delivery is handled by OTG, working with participating Newark restaurant concepts including Nonna’s Kitchen and Victory Grill. United has not disclosed a cost for the pilot or confirmed whether it will charge a service fee once, or if, the programme is rolled out more widely.
The airline plans to extend the test to Houston later this year with a broader set of national restaurant brands, and says customer feedback from both cities will determine whether the service expands to further airports. If it does, United intends to fold ordering into its seatback inflight entertainment screens, following the same logic behind the airline’s fleet-wide rollout of Starlink WiFi and its in-app TSA wait-time tracker.
Who this actually helps
The clearest winner is the connecting passenger with a tight buffer between gates, exactly the segment United is targeting at Newark. It is a narrower use case than airport-wide concierge tools such as Boston Logan’s Amelia AI avatar, which serves general wayfinding and information rather than a single high-friction moment in the journey.
For airport commercial directors, the more interesting number is not the passenger benefit but the concession one: this is a pre-order channel that captures spend before a customer reaches a shop front, a mechanism concession operators bidding into tenders like Gatwick’s 3,800 sq m F&B tender will want to watch for its effect on footfall versus pre-ordered collection.
It sits alongside a wider run of live operational AI and digital-CX pilots this year, including the agentic AI trials under way at CVG and Munich, where operators have warned against adopting new tools for their own sake rather than a measured operational return. United’s pilot is scoped tightly enough, nine gates, one terminal, one partner, to avoid that trap, but the test of value will be whether Houston and any subsequent airports show a measurable lift in ancillary spend or connection reliability, not just customer sentiment.
What to take from it
There is no published cost, fee structure or revenue split to copy yet, so airports and concessionaires have nothing to procure directly from this announcement. The practical move is to track the Houston expansion and United’s promised feedback data before assuming this becomes a standard airline offering, and for concession operators bidding into upcoming F&B tenders to ask incumbent airline partners whether similar pre-order arrangements are already in scope.
