PKL wins Educatering Innovation Award

PKL are delighted to announce that we have won the Innovation Award at the 2011 Educatering Excellence Awards last night, for our joint work with Flourish.

PKL and Northamptonshire County Council (Flourish) worked together to enable 225 schools to provide hot meals for their pupils. The schools involved in the project had inadequate kitchen space, and in many cases, no kitchen facilities at all. To provide a solution, PKL and Flourish developed a range of specially designed modular kitchen solutions, which would provide these schools with instant hot cook kitchen facilities in a permanent kitchen building. The product was based on PKL’s existing KitchenPods (themselves a recent innovation to the marketplace), which were then developed to suit the needs of the schools in Northamptonshire.

Working together, PKL and Flourish developed three standard sizes of KitchenPod, specifically for the schools, with three separate internal equipment designs capable of providing anywhere between 75 and 150 hot meals in a single sitting.

During the design and build of the KitchenPods, PKL and Flourish came up with a number of innovative ideas and solutions, including a range of external finishes, including wood cladding and brick slip, which allowed the pods to be matched to existing school buildings, or individually designed. A contract rental solution was also created, whereby all service and maintenance of the pods and equipment was included, providing schools with the peace of mind of having a known fixed cost.

As the construction and fitting out of units took place off site, it caused minimal disruption to the schools, as the only work required onsite was the ground and services preparation. This meant that the fully equipped kitchen unit could be delivered to site on a lorry, craned into position and connected to services within half a day. Due to the short installation times of the KitchenPods, PKL and Flourish were able to undertake the vast majority of the kitchen installations over the summer holidays, causing little if no disruption to each school.

Although a permanent solution, KitchenPods are fully re-locatable so if the needs of a school change in the future, or if there is ever a requirement to extend school buildings over the current kitchen location, it can easily be moved. In addition, as the kitchen is a modular building, it can easily be extended by adding more units to it, should there be a need to significantly increase catering capacity over time.

The Innovation Award was collected by Lee Vines, Sales and Marketing Director, who said “We pride ourselves on our innovative approach and can-do attitude, so we are delighted to have received this award for our work with Flourish on the school KitchenPods”.