When you're cooking food to serve more than 40,000 feet in the air, you tend to plan for some turbulence.

At airline service provider dnata's brand new $6.5 million kitchen in Canberra, the much maligned in-flight meal has been refined down to an exact science.

The entire site, manned at any one time by just 20 staff, runs like clockwork; cooking, packaging and loading up more than 60,000 meals a month for Canberra Airport airlines.

While dnata's sprawling Canberra kitchen is somewhat diminutive compared to its monster facilities in Sydney and Melbourne, it is often called upon to serve high-end VIPs and charter flights, from the Prime Minister and the defence force to visiting heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"We did a lot of cold cuts and cheese for the German air force," executive chief Chris Mirams-Harrison says, leading The Canberra Times on a tour of the facility. "And a big breakfast with sausages....We have to be flexible, plan for cancellations."

We've passed beyond the initial quarantine chamber and men and women wearing masks are unloading crates of fresh fruit. In long halls of stainless steel resembling laboratories as much as kitchens, each portion is carefully weighed to airline specifications.

While plane food often gets a bad rap, award-winning chef and culinary manager at dnata Rob Smithson says it's evolved rapidly in the past decade to stay on trend with restaurants. There's not much chefs haven't tried over the years, from steak ("we cook it to medium rare and then its finished to medium or well done on the plane") to shepherd's pie.

"But raw seafood is a no-no," Mr Smithson admits.

"Our food safety standards are the strictest in the business.And you do have to choose your ingredients wisely; someone could be eating in turbulence, so you don't want to serve anything too delicate that will fall apart."

To that end, menus are planned well in advance and religiously tested - including up in the air. In a dry, pressurised cabin, taste buds are suppressed, making food bland and sending Rob's team reaching for the spices.

"We test it all so you don't notice the difference, but with the way the newer aircraft are designed, the impacts of cabin pressure are actually less intense, there's more moisture in the air," Mr Smithson says.

Business and first class food is cooked fresh before the flight, then chilled on trays using dry ice. The plane's crew can reheat or finish cooking meals using onboard ovens.

With limited space and so much at stake on every flight, specifications must be followed to the letter; trays arranged just so, lettuce leaves carefully combed for insects.

The temperature of meat, in particular, is constantly monitored - from the time it arrives as a frozen pack of tenderloins to the time it is set down on a seat tray.

To minimise the chance of food poisoning, the pilot and co-pilot are even served different meals.

Of course, portions have shrunk down considerably since the smorgasbords once offered up during the so-called "Golden Age of Flying" in the 1950s and 1960s. Rising fuel prices have forced airlines to consider the weight of meals along with everything else on board, but Mr Smithson said smaller portions also reflected a general shift towards healthier eating.

"Food used to be the entertainment on the plane," he says.

"You’d get on and that was what you were waiting for, now there’s movies and other media. But we still try to make it a [show-stopper]."