Quality: The importance of meeting quality standards

For the uninitiated, building a commercial kitchen often brings many problems related to local regulations as well as practical operational features that don’t quite work. Getting the kitchen infrastructure right first time allows the area to function properly straight away and to last under the demanding working conditions that a busy commercial kitchen faces.

In this post, I'll outline just a few of the design and quality considerations you'll need to make when procuring a commercial kitchen.

Regulatory Compliance

Wherever in the world your kitchen is being built, it must comply with local regulations. Not to do so can bring substantial, unexpected cost and delays to programme. Whilst regulations will vary from the European Union, to the United States, to Russia and the Middle East, there are common areas that they all cover. If you are aware of these areas, then you can ensure that your supply chain is paying the right level of attention to this detail.

• Electrical Safety: Is the overall design of the kitchen, the individual components and the catering equipment certified to meet any international or local standards?
• Gas Safety: Has the correct supply quantity been worked out? Are the pipes correctly sized? Are the component parts of the supply properly certified and installed by a competent engineer?
• Food safety of construction materials: Are walls, floors and surfaces made of foodsafe materials?
• Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide testing: Around 20 people a year in the UK are killed by being in badly ventilated facilities, which can also cause illness. How will the kitchen be properly ventilated?
• Montreal Protocol: Is the refrigeration and cooling plant compliant with this international protocol?
• Lighting Levels: Is the space adequately lit to meet the local standards for a kitchen?
• HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points): Does the design of the kitchen allow HACCP management, or is it fundamentally flawed from the outset?
• CE Marked or GOST Certified: Is the catering equipment compliant with local standards?

Design and Build Quality

Regulations aside, kitchens are put under pressure by the use of water, the frequent use of cleaning chemicals, the heat of cooking processes and sometimes by unskilled or temporary users. Kitchens that are not designed and built to withstand these pressures simply do not last and will require replacement, or at least the cost and severe disruption of refurbishment, far sooner than the user might hope.

The build quality of the structure that the kitchen is housed in is also critical. Key features are adequate load-bearing for floors, correct wind or snow loads, heating and ventilation that are suited to local climatic conditions such as extremes of heat or cold, and dust. Like any specialist space, the internal design of a kitchen has many features that require close attention. These include fire safety, fire suppression, sufficient space between equipment, anti-slip floors, water resistant floor construction, services and sockets designed for easy cleaning and access, and infestation-proof construction of walls and doors to name but a few. Getting these things right makes a huge difference to the financial and operational success of a kitchen building project. 

PKL has 25 years of experience providing temporary and permanent infrastructure around the world. We sell and hire equipment, tented and modular kitchens that will meet local regulations and best practice in design and build quality. We get things right first time and aim to provide cost and programme certainty, giving peace of mind to clients who want to avoid unnecessary problems.

For more information on our international division, PKL Transworld, click here.
To find out more about UK kitchen hires, click here.

Catering for change

Open plan temporary kitchens have been used by the prison service for a considerable period of time during which they have undergone a significant amount of change. Lee Vines a Director at PKL explains.

The design and specification of temporary kitchens has changed a lot since we delivered our first open plan facility to the prison service nearly 10 years ago.  Many of these changes have been driven by new technologies allowing for improved facilities to be supplied, while close consultation with the prison service and catering managers has also led to developments in temporary kitchen design not only in terms of improving quality standards but ensuring compliance with health and safety legislation.

Of course, there is no standard layout for a temporary kitchen and it’s important that each facility is designed and installed to meet the particular requirements of the prison in mind and to this end, dialogue between all parties at the early design stages is crucial. This helps to ensure that a facility is supplied that matches the expectations of the prison kitchen staff, and more importantly, correctly services the needs of the prison.

Consultation with the prison service is an important factor that has helped to develop the design of temporary kitchens. Many considerations that have been raised at one time or another during projects over the last 10 years are now standard requirements of a temporary open plan kitchen.

Developments that have been made to temporary open plan complexes include ensuring a clear line of site through the careful engineering of the modules so that when they are assembled to create the kitchen, internal walls and supporting columns are minimised and any partitions are as low as possible.  Similarly, extraction canopies are sited so as not to impair visibility.

The goods in area is also an aspect where design has improved over the years, with strengthened floors provided to cope with heavy pallets while the inclusion of bump rails in high traffic areas helps protect the walls from damage from trolleys.

Recent experience has also shown that if you locate heating and ventilation plant on top of the temporary building (within a plant room module) it will benefit from enhanced protection, including cladding for ductwork and a housing to protect it from the elements and bird ingress.

A more recent innovation in open plan temporary kitchen design is the option to provide tempered air. This ensures that in the morning, instead of coming into a kitchen that has had cold air circulating all night, the building will benefit from having had warm air circulation instead.

Health and safety considerations have also evolved open plan temporary kitchen design. An illuminance of 300-500 lux lighting, combined with even illumination provides a safe environment for food preparation and helps to reduce the risk of slips and falls. The inclusion of a small porch over entrance areas also helps to prevent slip hazards by reducing the risk of rainwater pooling. In addition, changes to legislation surrounding ventilation means that temporary facilities should be tested for a safe level of carbon monoxide emissions before they arrive onsite.

Developments in the provision of temporary facilities are not just restricted to the design of the complex, with as many changes to the way in which projects are delivered and handed over witnessed in recent years.

Onsite access (particularly for low loaders and cranes), and siting units in a position which ensures that there is no compromise to security on site must be given as much consideration as the actual prison design itself, while risk assessments and method statements for each area of the delivery and installation process are now often a standard requirement.

It is also important to take measures to ensure the kitchen runs smoothly from day one. To that end, staff training is vital and we have found this is particularly effective when the entire catering team and the prison Head of Works attend the training session. In this way the information is spread as widely as possible.

Post handover service has also developed and to ensure a smooth operation in the kitchen we would advocate weekly planned preventative maintenance (PPM) visits by the kitchen provider for the first four weeks, followed by regular PPM visits thereafter. It is also helpful if operation and maintenance (O&M) manuals are located in the kitchen.

By their very nature, temporary kitchens won’t be an exact match for a permanent kitchen but there is no reason why they shouldn’t come extremely close to best practice design standards. By ensuring a close working relationship and constructive dialogue between the prison and the kitchen provider and by developing ideas into common design features, expectations of what can be achieved with a temporary kitchen facility should be raised from one project to the next.

Commercial Kitchen Design Services

PKL have provided 1000s of commercial kitchen designs for a wide range of end users in both the public and private sectors. Our experienced in house team can provide clients with a wide range of commercial kitchen designs, ranging from single portable units, large open plan temporary facilities, large scale temporary facilities for events, permanent modular kitchen buildings and kitchen design layouts for existing permanent buildings.

Our design service covers:

• A full knowledge of commercial kitchen design and planning regulations
• Site visit if required to overcome design issues
• Provision of CAD kitchen designs
• Full consultation through kitchen design process to ensure facility meets exact requirements
• Full adherence to health and safety requirements