A Snapshot of PKL's 2015: Part 2

In such a busy company, it's impossible to tell you everything we've been up to this year, so instead we've given one highlight to represent each month of 2015, to give you a quick snapshot of our year! Here's Part 2!

July - LACA Exhibition

We headed off to the annual LACA exhibition in July, and as well as having a stand inside, we took one of our Food Cubes with us which delegates were able to have a look around. Visitors to our stand were given a special treasure map to help them hunt down the Food Cube, which was located outside the exhibition, and also have the chance to enter a lucky dip to win a prize!

August - Wilderness Festival

We supplied four coldrooms and over 250 items of catering equipment for Wilderness Festival 2015, spread over nine different locations on site, offering a wide range of food and dining options.

Highlights included long table banquets, which involved luxury, large-scale communal dining, and featured a different guest chef each day. Guest chefs included Raymand Blanc, Angela Hartnett, and Niklas Ekstedt, and they catered for around 700 people each day.

September - Getting Schools Ready for the New Term

We had a busy time in August and September making sure that schools were ready to provide a meal service in time for the new term. This included lots of KitchenPods, which were installed at primary schools to make sure they were ready to provide hot school meals in September, and an impressive temporary kitchen installation at a school in London, where we had to crane lots of kitchen units over buildings to their location at the back of the school.

October - Back to the Future Day!

We celebrated back to the future day by digging through some of our photo archives to see if we could recreate them in the modern day.  While it was a lot of fun to do, we were also surprised at just how many members of staff were still around to recreate their original poses, particularly as many of the photos we used dated back to the late 80s and early 90s. You can see some more of our time travelling staff just here!

November - U-Select is Coming!

November was a hugely exciting time for us at PKL, as we prepared for the launch of a new division, U-Select. This involved the designing and launching of a new brand for the division, a new website, and preparations for the launch event, which was held at a venue called the Ice Tank in London. You can see some pictures of the launch day above, and also some of the U-Select team enjoying lunch at Burgers@N8, the first ever U-Select customer!

December - Festival Supplier Awards Nomination

In December we were hugely honoured to be shortlisted for the Best Festival Support Service category in the Festival Supplier Awards 2016. This was for the work that we undertook at the Wilderness Festival in 2015 and we'll let you know in January how we've got on!

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about our 2015 highlights, and if you've not seen Part 1 of this series yet, you can read it here. All that remains is to wish you a safe and happy Christmas, and we'll see you again in the new year!

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!