Catering Equipment Hire for 13 Temporary Kitchens at Wilderness Festival

Thirteen Kitchens, Thirteen Caterers, One Equipment Supplier

A festival with premium dining across a large site is not one catering operation but many, each with its own caterer, its own menu and its own kitchen design. What the organiser needs from an equipment supplier at that scale is a single point of responsibility across all of them. PKL supplies more than 500 events a year and has supplied the last nine Olympic Games, and Wilderness Festival 2016 is a compact illustration of how that works on one site.

The Requirement

Wilderness Festival 2016 ran premium dining in thirteen separate locations across the site. Each location was operated by a different caterer, and the catering equipment in each area was specified by that caterer against their own menu. The organiser needed all thirteen event kitchens supplied, delivered and supported as one project.

What PKL Supplied

PKL supplied four coldrooms and over 350 items of catering equipment across the thirteen locations. That included a central production unit kitchen serving the Dining Room, where meals were produced for six pop up restaurants set around a single marquee with communal dining, and for the Chef’s Table, an intimate dining experience with a range of leading chefs. PKL also supplied equipment for a selection of large scale luxury banqueting restaurants and for the Boutique Camping area.

PKL worked with each caterer individually to create a kitchen design that suited their menu, rather than issuing a standard specification to all thirteen. Equipment came from PKL’s hire fleet of 55,000 items, which is what makes that number of parallel bespoke designs practical inside one event.

Keeping Thirteen Kitchens Running

More than 7,000 sit down meals were served across the festival, so reliability mattered as much as specification. PKL supplied a bespoke e-Handover Pack to each of the thirteen sites, customised with the detail for that specific kitchen, so each caterer had the information for their own equipment rather than a generic manual. That was backed by PKL’s 24 hour technical support line, with catering equipment engineers on call for the duration in the event of a failure.

PKL had supplied a comparable quantity of equipment to Wilderness Festival in 2015.