Paid or Free Commercial Kitchen Design services?

Firstly let’s dispel the myth about the “Free Design Service”! Nothing is free, what changes is where you pay for it!

The “Free” design is typically offered by an equipment distribution house and the cost of the design service will be included in the mark-up added onto the equipment costs, typically called Design & Supply.

The “Paid” design service is what you would go to a Consultant for, where you would pay a fee for a design and associated documents (depending on the level of service required)

Our scenario is probably directly comparable to Architect – Builder comparison! So if you find your project needing an Architect you will probably find that the “Paid” Consultant route is best suited to offer a complete design solution. If on the other hand you are only doing some small modifications to your kitchen and have a builder in you would probably find the “Free” design and build services from an equipment distributer more suited to your needs.

Catering Commercial Kitchens!

Designing a commercial catering facility is full of dynamically changing perimeters that are never helped or answered by many trade associations. The problem is that there are too many governing body’s involved in different sections of a kitchen that are only interested in their own insular requirements to actually give a damn about the overall kitchen and its function. Many of the personnel in these bodys either do not have the knowledge or the “stepping up to the plate” mentality to ever give you a viable solution other than the one written on their script sheet. In the end it is down to the foodservice designers of these spaces to become a Jack of all trades to enable them to come up with the best solution for the client needs while complying with all the regulations.

This blog is what I am hoping to use to document my ramblings on various subjects that get my goat to flush out some logical solutions.