PKL Goes Back to the Future!

Today, 21st October 2015, is officially "Back to the Future Day" - the date which Marty McFly and Doc Brown famously travelled to in the film. To celebrate this momentous day, we've dug out some photos from the PKL archives showing life at PKL since 1989 when the film was set. Keen to experience some time travel ourselves, we then set to work recreating some of our favourite snaps from over the years (many featuring the original staff members!)!

On the left, David (former Financial Director), Lee (current Managing Director) and Lucy (former Event Sales) carefully study an array of drawings and brochures in around 1996/7. On the right, Lee is back in his original pose, joined by Bill (Business Development) and Krista (Event Account Manager) in the same boardroom! Here's a bit of PKL trivia for you: although Lucy left the company many years ago, she's still the voice of the PKL phone system!

Operations Director Chris has barely changed since the original photo was taken in about 2003! Neither has the stairwell for that matter...

We appear to have experienced genuine time travel here! Design Manager Karsten is basically unchanged since 2004!

The photo on the left shows David, a CAD Technician and patterned-jumper connoisseur at PKL in the mid 1990s. On the right, Andre, the newest member of PKL's Design Team, recreates the classic pose.

The photo on the left was taken in the early 1990s of Christine, a Personal Assistant. Dan, one of our sales guys, stepped in to recreate this photo - all that's missing is a well-tended pot plant!

Celebrating 25 Years of PKL

This month, we are celebrating PKL’s 25 year anniversary. Over the last 25 years, we’ve undertaken 10,000 temporary kitchen hires across multiple sectors throughout the UK and around the world, and have grown to become the UK’s leading provider of outsourced catering infrastructure solutions.

Over time, the business has expanded to employ 85 people, and we now have a management and senior operations team with a collective experience of well over 100 years of working for the company, many of whom have been with us since the early days. Operating from our purpose-built head office and warehouse facility, we own 900 portable kitchen units and over 10,000 items of catering equipment which are hired to a variety of customers during kitchen refurbishments, events or during kitchen emergencies.

Some of our notable installations over the last 25 years have included large scale kitchen and dining facilities for numerous major sporting events around the world, facilities for the military in the middle east, and installations at prestigious UK sites including Buckingham Palace, Glastonbury Festival and a number of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

The PKL Quay over time. The first image was taken 10+ years ago, the second was taken today.

In the last few years, we’ve used our experience from providing temporary commercial kitchens to move into the supply of permanent modular kitchen buildings, via our KitchenPod and Food Cube products. This has resulted in local installations at Beaufort Co-operative Academy in Gloucester and Cleeve School in Cheltenham, as well as a number of projects around the country, including supplying 100 KitchenPods to schools in Northamptonshire. In addition to these products, our recently developed modular camp kitchen and dining solutions have been supplied to a number of mining and exploration sites in Africa.

Two of our favourite photos from the PKL archives.

One of our latest developments has been the launch of KitchenFM for Schools, which is a new product designed specifically for the education sector. Following the announcement of the School Food Plan, we developed KitchenFM for Schools with support from the Children’s Food Trust. This new contract hire solution is aimed at schools looking to expand or refurbish their existing kitchens so that they can introduce or increase their school meal provision.

Over the past 25 years we have helped a large number of establishments to implement changes to their catering and dining infrastructure. We have developed a number of innovative catering solutions which have played a significant role in shaping the future of the UK’s education, health and leisure sectors, as well as ensuring that we remain the UK’s leading supplier of temporary catering infrastructure.

Our latest staff picture and a recent office photo.

We are very proud of our achievements to date and will continue to build on our expertise and knowledge. As we look to the future, we look forward to maintaining PKL’s position as a major kitchen infrastructure solutions provider on an international scale. We will also continue to build on our strong reputation for innovation, through our work on developing new and exciting solutions for the fast moving sectors in which we operate. Here’s to the next 25 years!