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!
 

PKL is happy!

Today is the first United Nations International Day of Happiness. We are naturally happy people here at PKL, so we thought we'd share a few reasons why PKL is such a happy place!

A very happy portable kitchen unit

1. We are saving the planet, one eKitchen at a time! Well, we might not be singlehandedly "saving the planet", but our eKitchens are certainly doing their bit. With a number of energy-saving features, these portable kitchens are seriously energy-efficient compared to standard units, and help our customers reduce both their energy useage and costs. We'd say that's a great reason to be happy!

2. Our KitchenPods and Food Cubes are helping schools to provide hot school meals to pupils, keep them on site at lunchtimes, and improve pupils' diets. Happy, well-fed pupils can lead to better behaviour and concentration, which leads to happy teachers, which in turn leads to happy schools. Loads of happiness for everyone! Job done.

3. Our temporary portable kitchens get invited to loads of amazing events. From the Olympics, to pop-up restaurants, to festivals to film sets, our kitchens are on the guest list! One of our kitchens even travels around the world with Cirque Du Soleil! Our kitchens are very proud to produce food for all these fantastic events, which makes them very happy indeed.

4. The staff at PKL are all very happy. All our hard work over the years has resulted in us being presented with lots of lovely awards. It's great to know that people appreciate what we do, so we're all very happy. Well, apart from the poor person who has to dust all the awards each week..!

PKL at London 2012: Part 2

Following on from his previous guest post, today Commercial Director Peter Schad blogs about the various facilities that PKL supplied to the different London 2012 Olympic venues.

I thought you might enjoy a brief overview of each of the different kitchen and dining facilities we provided for the Olympic games last summer. Our major event facilities included temporary kitchens, dining halls and commercial catering equipment. As you will see, our facilities were hugely varied and served a number of sites at the Olympic Park and further afield.

The Athletes Village kitchen and dining facility -
it's the huge rectangular building at the bottom!

Athletes Village

Our largest facility at London 2012 was the Athletes Village temporary kitchen and dining facility at the Olympic Park in Stratford. This
was a 5,000 seat temporary venue used to feed the athletes, officials and workers at the Games, which was capable of supplying up to 60,000 meals per day. The facility itself was over 19,200m² while the size of the production kitchen facility housed inside it was the size
of a football pitch.

The venue consisted of a main production kitchen area, along with a wide number of
servery areas, each serving themed menus representing continents around the globe. Each of these servery areas also had a small production kitchen facility behind it, to ensure that food was in plentiful supply for 16,000 athletes during the Games.

Main Media Centre

We provided the temporary catering facilities for the Main Media Centre at the Olympic Park. This included all kitchen designs, installation and project management before and during the event. The Main Media Centre was a 24-hour operational centre which catered for the needs of all the press during the Olympics, serving over 10,000 journalists. The media centre itself was 10,000m² covering three floors.

Public catering at Olympic Park North

Public and Volunteer Catering at Olympic Park North

PKL supplied over 90 food outlets used for public and staff catering around the Olympic Park, servicing an area measuring 200,000m². Our kitchens were used to provide a wide variety of themed food from around the world, and over 50,000 people were served per day.

IOC Corporate Hospitality

As well as facilities for the athletes, staff and officials, we also provided numerous facilities for the corporate hospitality in and around the Olympic Park. This included temporary catering facilities within the IOC Olympic Hospitality Centre, which comprised catering facilities used to supply first class cuisine to 22 chalets that were playing host to VIPs including film stars and royalty.

In addition to the IOC OHC, we located a number of catering facilities on top of and inside Westfield shopping centre. These included catering infrastructure for a number of corporate clients who had set up temporary hospitality areas on the roof of Westfield, and a large production kitchen facility, situated within the shopping centre itself, which was used to provide the majority of hot food for all of the hospitality areas at Westfield.

Other Olympic Sites

PKL provided a large amount of temporary overlay to other Olympic venues including the rowing centre at Eton Dorney and the sailing venue at Weymouth. At Weymouth, we supplied two mini athletes village type facilities, used to feed the athletes, officials and workers on site.

We also supplied four large-scale kitchen and dining facilities which were used to support operations undertaken by the Met Police during the Olympics, each of which consisted of a kitchen and 500-man dining facility. In addition, PKL supplied eight separate facilities to American TV station NBC, to support their workforce during the Games.

PKL at London 2012: Part 1

In today's guest post, PKL's Commercial Director Peter Schad blogs about a particularly exciting project he worked on last summer...

The restrictions have been lifted, and I am delighted to finally be allowed to share last summer's big news with you!

PKL supplied temporary overlay facilities to 150 separate kitchen locations at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London 2012. This included a wide variety of locations around the Olympic Park, and other Olympic sites within the UK. In total, our temporary kitchens were used to provide over 250,000 meals per day.

The total facilities we supplied to the Olympics amounted to over 7,500 pieces of commercial catering equipment from PKL’s hire fleet, which were transported to London in over 140 lorry loads and installed by our team of engineers.

The overall contract represented four years of hard work from PKL, in competing for and winning the various temporary catering equipment contracts at London 2012, and working with LOCOG and the onsite contract caterers from an early stage to ensure that the venues were designed and supplied to exact requirements.
 
Turnkey Solution

We provided a complete turnkey solution including all design, transportation, installation, project management and maintenance services during the Games.

The installation process itself was undertaken over a five month period between February and June and involved the relocation of a number of PKL staff to London during this period to oversee the process. In addition, we employed a dedicated team for the delivery and installation process which helped to create an extra 25 jobs over a 12-18 month period. We assigned project managers to oversee each temporary kitchen installation, and had engineers based on site throughout the Games. This ensured that not only did the installation process run as smoothly as possible, but that crucially the kitchens remained operational during the Games period causing no disruption to the athletes. 

Awards and Recognition

As a result of my work on the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, I was honoured in Catering Insight’s Hot 100, and PKL was shortlisted for an International Sports Event Management Award, in the Event Overlay and Facilities category.

Final Thoughts

The most satisfying aspect of the London Games has been the scale of our achievement. Each year, the catering and dining facilities required for the Olympic Games gets bigger and bigger, and London 2012 was no exception. It has far surpassed any other Olympics in which we have been involved.

It was not just the size of the undertaking, it was the deadline. All facilities had to be completed within a short four-week window before the Games. Thanks to our extensive experience of supplying previous major games, delivering the entire project on time and on budget was a challenge which PKL rose to and fulfilled successfully. PKL had to rely on all its expertise to mobilise 30 engineers, 7,500 items of equipment, and nearly 200 40 foot truck movements.

Look out for Part 2 coming soon, where I'll give an overview of the different facilities we supplied to the various Olympic venues...

Winter Olympics Trade Visit to Sochi

PKL's Commercial Director Peter Schad has set off on a trade visit to Sochi in Russia to promote the company ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics. PKL has a wealth of Olympic experience which includes providing kitchens and catering equipment to the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Athens, Sydney and Beijing Olympics as well as the Youth Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Asian Games and many more similar events. 

The trip also has special significance for PKL, as we are based in Cheltenham, and Sochi is our twin town. Cheltenham Racecourse kindly donated some scarves, and Cheltenham Town FC generously provided a signed football shirt to be taken over (see photo, courtesy of Glos Media). The Mayor of Cheltenham also wrote a letter introducing PKL to the Mayor of Sochi.

The story has been featured in local newspaper The Gloucestershire Echo, and was also mentioned on BBC Radio Gloucestershire.

PKL at the Olympics - Beijing 2008 Athletes Village Kitchen and Dining

The Beijing Summer Olympics was the largest Olympics ever – and this was also true of the athletes dining facility in the Olympic Village. There were 16,000 athletes and officials from 204 countries, as well as 10,000 staff and guests – all to be fed 24 hours a day. 

Working through the master caterer ARAMARK, PKL were responsible for the design liaison, specification, supply, installation and 24 hour maintenance of all the foodservice equipment and coolroom facilities, in an area, which covered 20,000 sqm or three soccer pitches. 

To ensure a successful delivery, PKL established a project office in Beijing 12 months before the Games began. In addition to permanent PKL management and engineering staff, a team of Chinese project managers, translators and administrators were employed overcome any language, cultural and technical hurdles. All facilities were designed in full compliance to local fire, hygiene and construction standards. 

The key operational factor of this project was the ability of PKL to utilise prefabricated complex Portable Kitchen modules, and ship them worldwide quickly and cost effectively. All the equipment used was from the PKL hire fleet and at the end of the Games was re-hired to other projects.

For more information on our installation at the Athletes Village in Beijing, please click on the link below: http://www.pkl.co.uk/foodservices/portablekitchenhire.asp