Temporary kitchen installation on a tight central England site
When a leading global games and software developer began an 8-month refurbishment of their UK office and development centre, the in-house catering operation feeding 600 staff couldn't pause.
We worked with their contract caterer to design, plan and install a temporary kitchen that took over without a single service day lost.
Leading Global Games and Software Developer
National Contract Caterer
Central England
April 2026 - December 2026 (8 months)
Full breakfast-to-dinner service, 12 hours/day, 600 staff
Maxi production kitchen, Atom dishwasher unit, 20ft dry store container
High-output Rational ovens, Blue Seal suited cooking range
The catering team needed a temporary facility that matched the production capability of the kitchen they were leaving - not a stripped-back fallback. Twelve hours a day, breakfast through dinner, with no compromise on menu, was the brief.
Two specific site constraints made the install non-trivial:
The site sits on a business park with roads used by multiple other tenants. Our HIAB delivery vehicle had to be sequenced to minimise disruption to neighbouring businesses.
The available footprint was in the car park, with limited room to manoeuvre. Units had to be carefully lifted from the access road across into position rather than driven in.
Get the planning wrong and you risk a missed service window - which, for a catering operation feeding 600 staff in a single sitting, is not recoverable.
A customised kitchen, not a stock spec
The Maxi production kitchen was specified to the caterer's exact menu rather than supplied as a generic fit.
High-output Rational combi ovens for volume cooking and consistency; a Blue Seal suited cooking range sized to handle the sustained breakfast-to-dinner throughput.
The Atom dishwasher unit kept the service flow uninterrupted, and a 20ft dry store container handled the stock-holding the main kitchen would normally cover.
AutoCAD site planning before anything moved
Before any unit arrived on site, we produced an AutoCAD-generated site drawing covering:
This is the part of the job customers rarely see. On a tight site, every inch matters - and "we'll work it out on the day" is how programmes overrun.
A coordinated install
The HIAB lift was sequenced in coordination with neighbouring businesses on the park to minimise disruption. Each unit was lifted from the road across into its planned car park position, levelled, connected, and tested before handover to the catering team.
The temporary kitchen went live on schedule. The catering team have run the full 12-hour breakfast-to-dinner service for 600 staff without interruption since day one, and the temporary facility will continue through to December 2026 while the main building refurbishment completes.
The Operations Director at Wilson Vale said:Thank you for your outstanding service through planning and installation. Your install team were fantastic and professional, and we were very happy with the equipment and kitchens supplied - with all appliances being modern and high-quality manufacturers.
The kit is only half the job. The other half is planning every metre of the site, every lift, every connection, before a unit leaves the yard - so the customer's catering operation doesn't lose a service day through a major refurbishment.
If you're planning a refurbishment with a constrained site, a continuous catering operation to maintain, or a high-volume daily service that can't pause, get in touch.
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