United Airlines is trialling a United Airlines gate preorder service at Newark Liberty International Airport, allowing passengers on select flights to order food, drinks and travel essentials through the United app before boarding. The order is then ready to collect near the gate, removing the familiar dilemma of choosing between a meal and making a flight on time.
How the United Airlines Gate Preorder System Works
The pilot is currently running across up to nine gates in Terminal C at Newark. When a passenger’s flight is part of the trial, United sends a notification ahead of departure with a prompt to order. The menu spans sandwiches, salads, snacks, kids’ meals and drinks, with local options including food from Nonna’s Kitchen and Victory Grill. Passengers needing something other than a meal can also order charging cables, travel pillows and select over-the-counter medications.
Once the order is prepared, it is waiting near the gate. Passengers can eat before boarding or carry everything onto the aircraft. The process is designed to cut the time spent queuing at airport concessions during the narrow window between arriving at a gate and boarding.
David Kinzelman, Senior Vice President at United Airlines according to The Org, explained the rationale. ‘We focus on where the travel experience can be simpler for customers and innovating to remove friction along the way,’ he said. ‘The time right before boarding is one of those moments when customers want quick, easy access to food without added complexity. Newark is a high-volume connecting hub where customers often have limited time between arriving at the gate and boarding, making it an ideal place to pilot this type of service.’
Terminal C: Scope of the Test
The nine-gate footprint of the trial sits within a much larger facility. According to Way.com, Terminal C at Newark has 68 gates in total and has been in operation since 1988, making it one of the longer-established terminals at the airport. That scale helps explain why United selected it as the launch site: with tens of millions of passengers moving through a single terminal, even a contained nine-gate pilot generates enough volume to produce meaningful feedback on whether the concept works at pace.
The connecting-hub dynamic Kinzelman referenced is central to the logic. Passengers transiting through Newark on tight connections frequently arrive at a gate with little time and limited options. A preorder system sidesteps the queue entirely, which is precisely the friction United says it wants to reduce.
Houston Next, With an Expanded Format
United has confirmed that Houston will be the next city in the programme, later this year. The Houston test is planned to include more restaurant options than the Newark version and, eventually, food delivered directly to the gate rather than collected from a nearby point. Customer feedback from Newark will shape what form the expansion takes.
The preorder trial sits alongside other food-related changes United has made recently. Earlier this year the airline revamped its Polaris menus with new chef-curated dishes for international business-class travellers, part of a broader push to make food a more prominent part of the flying experience across its network.
Whether the gate preorder format scales beyond Houston will depend on what the Newark data shows, but United has indicated clearly that the service is being built around the connecting-passenger experience, where time between gates is short and the cost of joining a long queue is simply missing your flight. The Houston expansion, with direct-to-gate delivery on the roadmap, will test whether the model holds in a different hub environment.