Case Studies

F900 screams out to Grazing Food

Workplace caterer puts F900 at the heart of its business

Grazing Food specialises in event and corporate catering and the new kitchen follows a two year search for the right premises. “It needed to be close enough into town because we are transporting a lot of hot food and we didn’t want to spend extra time and money going back and forth,” says owner Sam Hurst.  

The cookline that forms the hub of the new kitchen includes a series of gas cooking appliances from the Falcon F900 range.  

Grazing’s ethos is to leverage the strength of its central production kitchen in order that everything is done with a minimum amount of fuss on-site.  It has become very good at designing menus, operating an eight-week rotating menu comprising hundreds of dishes to ensure maximum variety.  

The company first saw the F900 at the Hotelympia exhibition in February 2016 and Hurst admits they were instantly impressed.  “We liked the added depth you get with it,” he says.  “Falcon is a known brand to us, we’ve used bits of their kit before.  We liked the fact that we were buying British, it was well-priced and it ticked a lot of boxes – solid, expandable and relatively easy to service.  It also just looked good, so that was part of the reason as well.  

We want to get at least five to seven years out of kit and for it not to cause us headaches along the way.  The last thing we can afford is for a piece of kit to go down.  

This kitchen was built with future growth in mind.  We are working six days a week for about twelve hours a day at the moment, but that leaves another twelve hours every day and another whole day that we could be using.”  

Grazing’s executive chef, Robbie Lorraine, has twenty years’ experience working in large industrial kitchens and was instrumental in the design of the new facility.  “In terms of cooking, we wanted heavy duty equipment, which is why the Falcon F900 screamed at us when we saw it,” he says.  “We wanted something that we knew was going to take some real punishment – not just giving us durability but longevity as well.   

The most important thing is choosing equipment that will stand the test of time.  You have got to give the guys the kit they need to be able to deliver the product you want.”

A full version of this article can be found in the digital version of the August 2016 issue, at foodserviceequipmentjournal.com.