Who was responsible for the selection of the contractor and the kitchen suppliers?
We’re independent so the selection of the contractors was done by ourselves, but I wasn’t involved at that stage. The kitchen fit out was outside the contract and we looked at a number of kitchen contractors before selecting Vision who were recommended by Kendal College, a centre of catering vocational excellence. Had they already used Vision? Yes, and that decided it really. We didn’t have the expertise within the college to design kitchens so we bought in that skill from Vision and then worked with them on the design and purchase of the equipment. We obviously already had kitchens and we had a limited budget, so we asked Vision to do an assessment of the present catering equipment with a view to reusing as much as possible in the new kitchens. So some of the kitchens are a mixture of new equipment and reused equipment – we even rescued things like the electric fly killers! How feasible was integrating new and existing equipment? One kitchen is completely new, the others are about 40%
