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...