Akasa Air has rolled out a new Café Akasa menu. The headline items are a Chicken Pulimunchi Sushi that takes the spicy, tangy coastal Karnataka preparation and rolls it into a sushi format, a Vietnamese Chicken Salad, a Grilled Chicken Steak with mango achari relish, an Asian Chicken Sandwich and a Jain-friendly Tandoori Soya Wrap. There is a Kids Sky Treats combo for younger flyers, and on the beverage side a Sea Buckthorn drink built around the Himalayan berry sits alongside a Colombian brew South Indian filter coffee.
The airline has framed the launch around protein-rich and health-focused choices, with vegetarian and non-vegetarian options across price points. The menu continues to carry festive specials through the year, from Makar Sankranti to Christmas, and passengers can pre-order cakes for birthdays in the air. Packaging for perishable meals is paper-based and recyclable, and the cutlery is wooden and biodegradable. The airline has focused on food right from the inception of the airline in August 2022 and has over the last four years tweaked the menu along with having regular monthly specials on offer. In line with all other low-cost / value carriers, the fresh, perishable items, which is where most of the new menu sits, are pre-book only through the Akasa Air website, app or travel agents, up to 12 hours before departure. Airlines have long shifted to this model to ensure reduction in wastage with buy-on-board items stirctly those with longer shelf life. Onboard, the crew sells from a buy-on-board menu of beverages, snacks and ready-to-eat options, with hot meals and hot drinks only on flights longer than 60 minutes. So a passenger who walks on board hoping to try the sushi will most likely have to settle for something from the trolley instead, when not pre-booked.
Buy-on-board has been the default for Indian low-cost flying since the mid-2000s, and IndiGo built its model around it from its first flight in 2006. For years the IndiGo trolley was a short list of sandwiches, cup noodles, upma and poha that needed hot water, cashews and soft drinks. IndiGo kept ovens away from its planes with focus on price, frequency and on-time performance , a formula that worked well enough to make it the largest airline in the country. In August 2022, the same month Akasa Air took off, IndiGo launched 6E Tiffin with 22 new items. In September 2023 it reworked the offer again as 6E Eats, keeping the Chicken Junglee Sandwich and a Choice of the Day, adding regional dishes under #IndiaByIndiGo, and bringing in a poured beverage service to cut plastic waste. Akasa Air came in with food as part of its personality from day one. Café Akasa launched with fusion dishes, festive meals and cakes, and the menu has been reworked roughly once a year since. The June 2024 refresh brought a 45-plus item menu with dishes like the Chaat-buster Box and Khow Suey Chicken. October 2025 added Chicken Schnitzel and a Masala Beetroot Burger. The October 2026 menu is the next step on that same path.
Can food make the difference?
On variety and creativity, Akasa Air has clearly been ahead. An Indianised sushi, a kids combo, Jain-friendly options and festive specials for more than a dozen occasions add up to a food programme that feels curated. IndiGo’s menu, by comparison, has stayed built for speed and simplicity: a few classics, a daily choice, ready-to-eat items and a trolley the crew can clear within a short sector. Akasa has treated food as part of the brand. IndiGo has treated it as a service that should not slow the turnaround.
The numbers, though, tell us where passengers actually are. In August 2026, IndiGo held 65 percent of the domestic market and carried 78.87 lakh passengers, while Akasa Air held 5.5 percent with 6.68 lakh passengers. IndiGo flies to far more cities, offers far more frequencies on most trunk routes, and in many smaller cities it is the only option. A traveller choosing a 7 am departure from Bhubaneswar or a same-day return from Indore is picking the schedule, not the sandwich. On that basis, Akasa’s better menu has not yet moved the needle in a measurable way.
The menu is strong for the planner, the family on holiday and the regular Akasa flyer. It is far less visible to the walk-up business traveller, who is exactly the customer an airline most wants to win over. A sushi roll or a sea buckthorn drink makes a good first impression and a good social media post. Whether it makes someone shift their next booking from IndiGo, especially when fares are close, is a different matter. Food in a low-cost cabin tends to be a tie-breaker, not a deciding factor. However things are changing for Akasa Air.
Network Thoughts
Akasa Air currently operates 43 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft against a firm order of 226. As that gap closes, the airline will move from being an alternative on select routes to being a real choice on many more of them. That is when the menu could start to matter. Once a traveller has two airlines with similar fares, similar timings and similar on-time records on the same route, the experience on board becomes one of the few things left to compare. Akasa has spent four years building that layer while its network was still small, which is a smart order of work.
The bigger unlock for Akasa may be in making the menu easier to reach. If more of the fresh items become available to buy on board, or the pre-book window shrinks, the menu reaches the passengers who matter most for growth. Bundling meals into corporate fares more widely. So will Café Akasa be the differentiator against IndiGo as the fleet grows? It could become one of several, alongside reliability, a younger fleet and service style. Whether food alone can shift loyalty in a market where two out of three domestic passengers already fly IndiGo is still an open question. The next two years, as Akasa’s deliveries pick up, should tell us whether the Indian traveller chooses an airline for what is on the tray or still only for what is on the departure board. What would make you switch?
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