The brief for this multiple roll out project and other Lincolnshire schools came from David Saunders: Food in Schools Coordinator at Lincolnshire Council. His vision was to enhance the school meal dining experience by providing new exciting and welcoming dining rooms for the students which reflect high street food court operations.

The work undertaken by INOX Equip and Robert Woodhead involved a total strip out and refurbishment of the old, tired, refectory style canteens.

By creating a more attractive and varied dining experience, this has resulted in the increased uptake of school meals. This has allowed the schools to further improve the quality and diversity of the food on offer. All of the schools are showing great increases in the quantity of meals served and therefore are a more profitable operation. Since having the new serverys installed, each school on average has seen an increase of 300+ meals per week.  This has turned the deficit catering budgets into profitable businesses.

Inox Equip played a range of roles before, during and after this project. Inox Equip designed and specified the food service counters as well as the dining room furniture and layouts.

As with many School projects, budget constraints matched with high expectations created a challenging project.

David Saunders said: “We are all delighted with the quality and design of the new counters. Inox Equips very professional team has created a wonderful environment for the students to have lunch in. Our thanks go to Inox Equip who have helped to transform the deficit budgets and the food  choices now offered at the schools”

A successful night at the CEDA awards…..

Profit Sector Smaller Project Category - Winner (Neston Park Farm Shop)

Cost Sector Smaller Project Category - Winner (Audley Primary School)

Cost Sector Large Project Category - Runner Up (EMPA Dining Halls Lincolnshire Schools)

Thanks to all the Team, Clients and all our Partners for helping us achieve the kind of design and delivery that made these awards possible and more importantly provided an excellent service and product to our Clients. Thank You

Inox Equip Ltd has been awarded the prestigious new commercial kitchen build for Colworth Science Park. We will be working in conjunction with the original tender consultants – Tricon Foodservice. Inox Equip Ltd are delighted to be involved with the 14 million pound project – Watch this space for this exciting project to develop and unfold!

Inox Equip Ltd fought off the competition with blistering 3D walkthroughs and dynamic CAD modelling when providing original designs for a top class dining room experience to school children across Lincolnshire.

Faced with the prospect of 14 School Serverys, part funded by Lincolnshire County Council and part funded by the schools themselves, getting backing from the schools was critical. This is where Inox Equip’s unique CAD service was able to model each school servery individually and produce high quality 3D presentation material to win over the governors and head teachers with each design.

The solution to providing a cost effective, yet high quality dining room experience was born through a strong relationship with counter manufacturer Alan Nuttall Ltd.

In order to design, manufacture and install a large quantity of school serverys in a short space of time, Inox and Nuttalls developed a modular servery counter system. The focus behind this system meant the manufacturing process was kept as simple as possible, whilst creating a flexible and high quality servery for each school.

The installation of these serverys was delivered with ultimate precision and coordination between the builders - Robert Woodhead, Inox Equip and Nuttalls to get the first 3 counters installed during the short Easter holiday.

Key Achievements

Waiting times have been hugely reduced from over 15 minutes to an almost instant service; this has allowed 300 extra meals to be served per week.

All the schools have reported a rise in uptake and therefore profit; more children are staying on site during lunchtime, not searching for lunch alternatives away from the school premises.

Overall an increased uptake has turned the deficit kitchens into a profitable business.

Our involvement with Birmingham City Council was with their newly assembled team to look into delivering a food offering for the Junior and Infant (J&I) schools in Birmingham. Inox Equip were given areas such as I.T. suits, libraries and redundant classrooms to create modern, efficient kitchens and serverys that would prepare, cook and serve up to 600 student meals in a 45 minute lunch period.

The start of the design process was to standardise on a product range of equipment that could be implemented into any area in any school, this included features such as a standard centre island cookline configuration that could be adapted to a wall mounted operation should the room configuration available not allow the initial desired centre island configuration. The design of each kitchen enables an aspect of ‘future proofing’ with consideration given to service points, types of equipment and the overall spacing of equipment.

It was essential to work to a tight but realistic budget giving consideration to the strict government target budgets for the new school meals program of building a kitchen in an existing building. All equipment specified by Inox Equip was available on the OGC buying agency which meant working with the client in an ‘open book’ policy on all capital equipment. Each J&I school to date came in, on budget in the region of £60k

have to be undertaken within a school holiday period which meant time planning was crucial to the success of the project. Our installation to commissioning would take on average 4 days with a dedicated 3 man installation team and 1 project manager. Working in harmony with all trades on site was key to meeting these timescales and the overall success of the project.

Health and safety is paramount within each project undertaken, a detailed method and risk assessment is produced for and reviewed by the main contractor prior to commencement of any Inox Equip works on site.

Although a simple sounding brief set out by the council was given, a visit to the schools soon revealed them to be mostly Victorian in construction and within conservation areas. This often meant  a lack of space, utilities and services and areas that you would not normally consider to be suitable for a commercial kitchen operation. It was essential that any plans for the new kitchen area would be sympathetic to the original building construction externally and internally such as fitting servery counters into Victorian window arches!

Other considerations included the weight of equipment specified due to the old Victorian wooden floors with cellars below. Preserving ornate ceilings, cornices, windows and mosaic tiles but still delivering a modern, hygienic kitchen that met all current legislations with regards to commercial kitchen design.

After the installation of each project a detailed training schedule is put in to operation to ensure that all kitchen staff are trained in the operation of all items of equipment by each manufacturer. Inox Equip negotiated free staff training from the manufacturers for the life cycle of the equipment should the school require it. A dedicated sales manager is assigned to the Birmingham area to ensure that the relationship with the catering team at each school as well as the project team at the council is maintained. 

Overall we are extremely proud to be involved in such demanding and interesting projects. We have received fantastic feedback from not only the council and contractors we have worked with, but central government inspectors who have visited completed sites have complemented us on meeting all key objectives within our brief.

When GF Tomlinson Birmingham Ltd, the building contractor managing the £13.5m rebuild of the Forum at the LG Arena, needed a partner for the design and installation of the catering elements, it contacted Inox Equip Ltd. Joint bids were submitted in October 2008 and Inox was awarded the £750k project in November 2008. The previous food offering resembled simple, kiosk-style fast food and the client wanted to create a facility that would ‘capture’ and excite up to 14,000 people, prior to them entering the Arena, and maximise spend per head while appealing to a diverse cross-section of customers such as concert goers, exhibition visitors and corporate sponsors.

The initial tender specification was drawn up by the NEC Group and their nominated architects and as a complete design team, Inox’s approach was to provide a venue that would deliver commercially, but with ongoing appeal to its varied audience, and offer a multiplicity of food offerings; ultimately, delivering a robust design for the client that would work efficiently in operation. Inox gave consideration to future-proofing and minimising environmental impact, as well as closely monitoring costs, especially in a tender bid situation and during the current economic climate. The largest challenge however, was the critical completion date and finite handover date as events had been pre-sold and were immovable! Inox attended weekly design meetings chaired by GF Tomlinson and provided new and updated design drawings throughout the process. 

To assist with the smooth running of the project, all outlets were treated as individual projects under the main project umbrella, which allowed the Inox team to concentrate on specifics, dealing with any issues in a methodical manner. Inox collaborated with all sub-contractors, which proved to be a successful and productive strategy, enabling them to ensure that the complete project was delivered in line with the strict NEC event calendar. Installation was carried out over a 5 month period and the project was handed over, on schedule, in June 2009.

As part of the handover process, Inox undertook:

•  Staff training for front-line, management and maintenance teams 
• Compilation of hard and soft copies of operating and equipment manuals for each area  
• As-built drawings, detailing approved design changes from the original specification 
• A debrief with client and supply chain The LG Arena is now a fantastic, state of the art entertainment venue, which offers a one-stop, pre-show entertainment experience. Customers are met with multiple destinations for food, drink, advertising and merchandise, in an open-plan, modern and dynamic setting and the fantastic Tower Deck offers an exclusive, private mezzanine with world-class hospitality, looking out over the renamed forumLIVE below. Caryn Masters, General Manager of Catering at both The NIA & LG Arena, says “Our business case to refurbish the LG Arena was based upon achieving an average concert catering spend per head of £5.10, which was a growth of 20% on previous spends. After trading the first three events we have achieved an average of £5.51, representing a 34% growth, and as much as £6.52, which we are delighted with. It demonstrates that we listened to our customers and are delivering concepts and choices to appeal to all, so we expect to be able to grow this further into the future with ongoing feedback and research.” 

Scope of Works: 

• 2 fast food operations, which are adaptable, for multiple offerings 
• Tower Deck bar with satellite kitchen, ware-wash facility, stills area, cold store and final food preparation via hoist from the production kitchen below 
• Café snack bar  
• Bespoke, hand-built restaurant servery, with full production kitchen 
• 7 refrigerated bulk storage areas 
• Ventilation canopies in all areas with integral, patented Halton Ventmaster ‘capture-jet’ technology 
• Multiple station bar with 4 multi-dispense, fast-flow stadium pumps 
• 3 bespoke, mobile pod catering-led outlets, designed for open-space exhibition venues, giving the perception of a permanent structure. Two of the pods provide two offerings and were specified as: a Champagne Bar, Cheese and Wine Pod, a Pick ‘n’ Mix, Smoothies Pod and a Grab ‘n’ Go Pod offering various food and beverages