Power Station Outages: Catering Facility Solutions

Power Station Experience

When power station outages take place, either planned or otherwise, it often results in a significantly increased number of staff on site. When this happens, additional catering infrastructure is often required to feed the extra numbers and cater for any teams working on sites away from the main canteen. This is where PKL can help.

With most power stations located in remote settings, there is rarely a local community infrastructure to fall back on to assist in the welfare of the contractors. Additionally, due to tight security measures in place to ensure site safety, it is often time-consuming and impractical for contractors to leave site to get food.

In recent years, PKL has provided a number of outage feeding solutions for energy generation stations and energy related industries such as petrochemical plants. This extensive experience has enabled us to tailor our service to the very specific requirements of these sites, and our detailed preparation allows each hire process to run smoothly and efficiently. We know that site safety and security are top priorities, and understand that PKL staff working on site may require induction, security clearance and site escorts.

To minimise installation time and disruption on site, we carry out a site survey prior to delivery and appreciate the need to book in vehicles and drivers beforehand. We always issue risk assessments, method statements and lift plans prior to arriving on site, and our vehicles and any lifting equipment come with the correct certification. We also ensure our drivers and engineers are aware of any specific PPE and ID required by the site.

To demonstrate PKL’s commitment to safety, security and operational excellence, we have the approved accreditations to back up our knowledge and demonstrate our competence in practice. PKL is OHSAS 18001 approved for our occupational health and safety management systems and we also hold both ISO 9001 for process management and ISO 14001 for the implementation and management of environmental management systems. Furthermore, we are SAFEcontractor and CHAS approved and our site operatives are all CSCS approved. We are also a Gas Safe approved contractor and F-Gas approved for refrigeration.

PKL Solutions

PKL can supply a number of different options, depending on each site’s exact requirements.

PKL kitchens are designed to be dual fuel and can run off either gas or electricity. This is an important feature for power station hires as many sites will not allow gas use or storage for safety reasons. All our hot kitchens come with full under canopy fire suppression.

Our newly developed Food Cube satellite feeding stations are designed to ease the pressure on canteen servery lines and save remote workers from spending valuable time getting to and from meal breaks. Food is cooked and prepared in the main canteen and then transferred to the Food Cube located elsewhere on site, where it can be kept warm or refrigerated prior to being served. The Food Cube design allows for the retailing of hot and cold meals, snacks, sandwiches, hot and cold drinks.

Where a cook and serve option is required, we offer three different sizes of Portable Kitchen,all with service hatches to allow a grab and go meal service. These self-contained kitchens use brand name commercial catering equipment for the storage, preparation, production and service of meals.

We also offer fully integrated temporary catering arrangements that comprise multiple buildings linked together to provide a tailor made kitchen solution. These can be linked to an existing dining structure, or to a servery building where the contractors can collect their meals to be eaten in their own mess buildings. Alternatively, we can provide a temporary dining facility on request.

Want More Info?

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like more information on how PKL can help power stations with the provision of catering facilities.

Your Invite to PKL's Food Cubes and KitchenPods Open Day

You! Yes you! You're invited to an open day at PKL where we will be giving you the chance to have a look at our Food Cubes and KitchenPods, and even some of our temporary kitchens.

We're going to have a number of units set up at our head office near Cheltenham, available for you to have a look around, so you can get an idea about how a new permanent modular kitchen or modular servery might fit in your organisation.

In addition, you'll get to meet members of our team, including many of those who have been blogging for PKL recently, who will be able to guide you through the facilities that we will have on show, and give you an additional tour of our complete on site facilities if requested (it's quite an interesting one, we promise!).

Did I mention that we're putting on free food as well???

The open days are being held at PKL's offices, just outside of Cheltenham on the 13th and 14th of June, and all you need to do if you would like to attend is email us at postbox@pkl.co.uk and let us know which day you would like to attend, whether you are bringing any colleagues with you, and what time you are thinking of getting here.

PKL Food Cubes. Modular servery buildings.

What is a Food Cube and How Can it Help My Business or Organisation?

Food Cubes are modular servery kiosks which can be used for a variety of means. Although we think that the picture of one here is nice, it really doesn't show just how good these units are, and we think if you see one up close you'll be mightily impressed!

You can also see up close just how well these facilities are constructed, and why they are supplied with a 15 year structural warranty and 60 year BBA accredited design life.

Food Cubes provide a flexible solution too. Not only are they available in a wide range of sizes, but they are supplied with a bespoke range of finishes including vinyl wrap, brick slip, painted exterior or wooden cladding. This means that we can design them to fit in with your existing site, or you can design them yourself, to look completely how you want them to!

Food Cubes have been used for a variety of means. This includes schools who are looking to increase their catering outlets to help increase the number of their pupils who are staying on site at lunchtimes or to help relieve congestion in busy dining areas. Food Cubes have also be specified by leisure attractions looking to increase the number of catering concessions they have on site to maximise their revenue from catering sales.

They work too, and have been helping businesses and organsiations increase their revenue, create new catering concessions and help to increase their meal take up.

What Are KitchenPods and Why Should you be Looking at Them?

PKL KitchenPods. Permanent modular kitchen buildings.

Our KitchenPods are permanent modular kitchens, constructed off site and delivered complete with catering equipment, ready to connect to services. They are available as single pods in a variety of sizes, or can be linked together to form much larger open plan kitchen facilities. Our KitchenPods are ideal where you have no kitchen and are looking to introduce a meal service, or where you are looking to create more revenue generating space in your premises, for example by converting your existing kitchen into extra dining space or extra bedrooms. In addition, they can also be used to provide central production kitchens, used to service satellite kitchens or servery areas.


Like our Food Cubes, KitchenPods are available in a wide range of external finishes, which includes brick slip, wooden cladding, painted exterior or vinyl wrap meaning that they can be designed to blend in with your existing buildings on site, or made to be completely bespoke to your own design. Although they are permanent buildings, they are also relocatable, meaning that they can be moved around your site if your usage requirements change over time, and because they are modular buildings, should you decide that you need to increase your capacity over time you can add new modules to increase the kitchen size.

As they are constructed off site, KitchenPods can be delivered to you and ready to go in as little as eight weeks from receiving an order.

During the open days we will also be exhibiting a range of our temporary kitchen facilities, so if you have a refurbishment projects coming up, and aren't so sure about what a temporary kitchen is, then now is your chance to come and have a look at one.

To register your interest in attending the open day, please email your details to postbox@pkl.co uk, stating the day you would like to attend and a time, or phone PKL on 0845 840 4242.

Customer Feedback Results FYE 2013

Firstly, thank you to all of our customers who have filled in customer feedback forms and sent them back to us. This has allowed us to monitor our performance over the last year, and will help us to improve our performance to you in the coming months.
 
During FYE13, we changed the way that we monitor and record our feedback results to incorporate the Net Promoter Score, an internationally recognised way of recording customer satisfaction levels that provides a figure which can be compared with other businesses and industries using the system. The change to our reporting method was undertaken in January 2013, and the analysis below covers those forms received between January and April 2013 using this new system. While it does not provide us with a full year’s results, it does give a useful snapshot on which to provide a comparison for next year’s scores and an assessment of how we've done so far this year.
 
Our customer feedback forms are split into five areas with a number of questions in each, and cover all aspects of our business and services.

Sales

Customers are asked to rate our performance over a number of areas, including how quickly we responded to their enquiries, how helpful and knowledgeable our staff were, whether we provided information in a clear and manageable way and whether our team continued to provide help throughout the sales process.

Quality and Preparation of Units and/or Catering Equipment

Customers were asked questions surrounding the condition of temporary kitchens and/or catering equipment they had hired from PKL when it arrived, whether it was as described in our sales process and whether it was reliable during the period of their hire.

Delivery and Installation

Respondents were asked to rate whether their delivery was on time, whether our drivers were helpful and knowledgeable and whether PKL complied with customers’ onsite health, safety and environmental protocol.

Operation and Training

Customers were asked to rate the quality of the operating hand books for catering equipment and temporary kitchens that were provided by PKL and how easy it was to follow the information contained within them.

Technical Support

If technical support was required during the hire period, our customers were asked to rate the level of service they received both within business operational hours, and from our 24 hours technical support service if they used the service out of normal working hours, the level of support and service received from our technical support team and whether we were able to fix their problem first time.

Net Promoter Score

In the analysis of NPS, a score of above zero is good and above 50 is excellent, while a score in minus figures would be of cause for concern. We are therefore delighted with an overall Net Promoter Score of 81 for the year, and in our overall feedback scores in each department which has given a satisfaction score of above 96% in each area of our business.
 
We will of course try to improve on these scores over the coming year and are continually looking at ways in which we are able to improve both our products and levels of service to you. We welcome your feedback at any time, either by emailing us at postbox@pkl.co.uk or phoning 0845 840 42 42.

Once again, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to fill out our customer feedback forms over the last year, and letting us know your thoughts and comments regarding the products and service that you have received from PKL. I will leave you finally with some of the comments that we have received from our customers over the last year.

Customer Quotes

"Have always used PKL as you provide exactly what I need when asked."
 
"A very helpful process for our client. Flexibility was a key part of this hire – Thank you."
 
"Excellent company in all aspects. Thank you for your support to our organisation."
 
"Particularly grateful for the professional and coordinated response from sales and finance together."
 
"Found PKL to be professional. They maintained contact throughout the agreement and were very helpful."
 
"Totally happy with service from start to finish. Machinery very reliable and customer services spot on. Many thanks for your service. Will not hesitate to use PKL again in the future if ever the situation arose."
 
"Consultant was Daniel Robinson – who was great."

"Great! Couldn’t believe how quick you were able to get it here."

Help measure the state of the nation’s school kitchens

Are your school’s kitchen facilities up to the job? Here at PKL, we are helping the Children’s Food Trust to carry out the first national survey of school kitchens across the country.

They are hoping the survey will provide them with information on a number of issues facing school food provision, enabling them to help more schools across the country with their tailored advice.

The Children's Food Trust are gathering information by asking a few short questions covering a number of topics. Are school kitchens big enough and modern enough to cope with feeding hundreds of children every day? Are schools having to allocate valuable budget for repairs and maintenance to ageing kitchens or equipment? Would schools benefit from more information on funding options to replace or improve their kitchen facilities?

To fill out the Children's Food Trust's quick survey to help them gather this vital information, click here and please encourage other school business managers to do the same before Wednesday 17th July.

Read why the Children’s Food Trust wants to see more support for schools to improve kitchens on their blog, and don’t forget they can help if your school is struggling with its kitchen facilities or food provision.

PKL Donates £6000 to the Children's Food Trust

Following the Olympic Games last summer, we went through our catering equipment hire stock and allocated a number of items to be sold off, which were surplus to our ongoing requirements. We’ve made this surplus equipment available at great prices through our Mid West Catering Equipment division, enabling caterers to buy quality, second hand equipment at a fraction of the RRP.

As you may already know, we pledged to make a donation to the Children’s Food Trust for every piece of kit sold, and I handed over our first cheque back in January, which was for a massive £8000.

Following on from this, I’m pleased to announce that I presented donation number two - a cheque for £6000 - to Rob Rees, Chairman of the Children's Food Trust last week.

Rob said: “We’re delighted PKL has supported us with another donation. The Trust’s work in encouraging more children, schools and parents around the country to have a positive experience with food is hugely important. This will help us reach more schools and more children in 2013.”

The Children's Food Trust is a national charity which aims to get children eating better, and its work includes developing healthy school menus and cooking skills with children. I’m very proud that PKL is able to support this charity, as they do a huge amount of work on improving children’s eating habits and, through this, encouraging children to reach their potential.

I look forward to PKL continuing to work with the Children's Food Trust to further support their excellent work.

New Mini Triton Kitchens

Having seen the popularity of our large 3-unit Triton kitchens with my clients, I suggested we develop more in our portfolio to make them available to a wider range of sectors and institution sizes.

Having developed the idea further with a team of colleagues, the new products are now a reality, so I am pleased to introduce our new 3-unit Mini Triton kitchens and 4-unit Mini Triton Plus kitchens! These temporary kitchens are a smaller, budget-friendly alternative to the larger Tritons.

The new 3 or 4-unit temporary kitchens offer all the benefits of the big Tritons, but have a reduced footprint, enabling them to fit onto smaller sites where the standard Tritons would be too large.

They offer the same separation of kitchen areas for good catering practice, and are ideal for medium sized institutional applications, such as for medium to large sized hotels, small hospitals and school refurbishments.

The Mini Tritons are quick to assemble on site, and their smaller size means that two units can be transported per lorry, minimising transport (and transport costs!) and offering a lower carbon footprint.

Please feel free to get in touch if you’d like a chat about whether our new Mini Tritons might offer a suitable solution for your requirements.

Plan views of the Mini Triton and Mini Triton Plus kitchens

How PKL can help with your event

In this post, Dan from our Events team blogs about some of our events experience and why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens and catering equipment at your event.

Organising an event can be quite a daunting experience! To make your event a success, there are a huge number of things you’ll need to consider and suppliers you’ll need to deal with.

On top of this, you only get one chance to get it right, so organising any areas you’re unsure about can be risky. The organisation of temporary catering facilities can be one of those areas, and getting this part wrong could be disastrous and leave you in trouble with your caterers, guests and even the authorities if not done properly.

Don’t worry though – as a member of the Events team at PKL, I know the kind of challenges you’ll be up against and I have plenty of experience in offering advice and supplying temporary catering facilities and catering equipment to all sorts of different events.
So, that’s one less thing you need to worry about!

Don’t just take my word for it though. Here’s a list of a few ways in which we can help, showing exactly why you should consider using PKL for temporary kitchens at your event. 

Proven Experience
We have over 20 years’ experience in providing temporary kitchens and catering equipment for events throughout the UK and around the world. In fact, PKL has been doing this since before I was born!

I regularly work to supply catering equipment and facilities to festivals, sporting events, conferences, exhibitions, product launches and pop up restaurants amongst others, for both front and back of house facilities. Recent projects I’ve worked on have included temporary kitchens for a number of locations at Frieze Art Fair, catering equipment for back of house use at the Brit Awards and pop up kitchens for the 'Last Supper Club' event in London. Last summer, PKL also provided 150 separate temporary kitchens for venues, back of house, public and hospitality catering at London 2012.

Equipment and Flexibility
We have the widest range of commercial, bulk and specialist catering equipment available in Europe with over 9,000 items in our hire fleet. This enables us to provide flexible solutions to meet your requirements, so whether you’re planning a standard menu for a large number of people or a bespoke menu for a specialist pop up restaurant, I can help plan a temporary catering facility and provide commercial equipment that is right for you.

For large scale catering, our panless kitchen solution using Gastronorm compatible ovens, refrigeration equipment, hot cupboards and servery equipment is often an ideal solution. We also have specialist facilities which I can advise you on, which enable us to construct temporary kitchens within existing buildings or inside marquees safely and in a compliant way.

Innovative Kitchen Design
Clients often approach us with weird and wonderful ideas for new event kitchen concepts. These have resulted in some of my favourite hires, so whether your temporary kitchen needs to be on top of a busy shopping centre or in Victorian tunnels underground, our experienced in-house design team are up for the challenge! Our kitchen designers can work with you to provide a facility that fits your needs and menu, and the requirements of your chosen location.

Preparation, Delivery and Installation
All our equipment goes through rigorous testing and inspection before each hire, as the last thing you want is for your kitchen to become inoperable during your event! Each item of equipment is put through a commissioning process and quality assurance check, and our temporary kitchens undergo a 30 stage pre-delivery inspection.

Our in-house transport team and engineers are vastly experienced in delivering and installing kitchen solutions, not only in the UK, but around the world. Our engineers hold a wealth of health and safety accreditations to ensure your kitchen is installed in a safe and compliant manner.

Technical Support
We understand that often there’s only one chance to get it right at an event, and operations can’t stop for any reason. To make sure your event runs smoothly, all our equipment and kitchens come backed with 24 hour technical support, and we can also offer the services of a 'babysitting engineer' to stay on site at your event if required.

Help in Specifying Other Products
Sometimes, you might require more than just catering facilities, and although we don’t supply them directly, I can help you source water and waste, marquees, furniture, power generators and gas. Our 25 years supplying event kitchens means that PKL has a vast knowledge of the industry so I can also recommend suppliers for many different aspects of your event if you are struggling for ideas on where to go.