It's a shame what Air France did to KLM and Alitalia. Kind of the Spirit or Frontier bargain brands of the AF group.
KLM's official explanation of their new tourist-class food/drink service was that they entered a new collective bargaining agreement with their cabin crew union, in which it was agreed there would be one less cabin crew member per longhaul flight. This new service was meant to make it easier on the cabin crews, in that they would only have to do one trolley run per flight instead of two, making the whole process more efficient. (And of course this has since been cut back further since Covid started - for the first few Covid months they stopped serving meals on any flight under 12hr.)
...that was the
official explanation for the media and the public...
...now here's the
real explanation, as given to me by the purser on a KLM flight I took last year...
The elimination of the drinks-trolley service, she told me, was due to an increase in drunken attacks on crew members. By making alcohol less available in flight, it is hoped that these attacks will decline. (At about the same time, many of the airport bars at Schiphol started limiting customers to three drinks.)
(Behave yourselves, mates - you don't want the airlines you fly to have to go dry.)