If you are in any way involved in the catering industry, especially the outside catering industry, you will need a lot of storage containers for plates, cups, cutlery, glassware, and so on, and you probably don’t have enough cupboards and drawers to store everything. Even if you do have a lot of space, if you are involved in the outside catering sector you need to transport all of your items from your base to the venue, and you obviously want to keep handling to a minimum.

That means that you don’t want to store items in cupboards and on shelves, even if you have a lot of them. What you need to do is to store everything in special boxes that you can simply pick up and load on to your van for transport and then unload at the other end. When you have finished the day and washed up you simply do everything in reverse.

The question then is what sort of boxes do you need? First and foremost, you need sturdy boxes that can take a bit of rough handling. It is no good going for the cheap options because they won’t last very long, and you don’t want to be buying new ones every year or so. 

You can buy some really good boxes made of heavy grade plastics that will take all the handling that they get. Many of these are made in Euro size which is 600mm x 400mm and will fit on both European and UK pallets. There are also other combinations such as 300mm x 400mm, 800mm x 600mm, and so on, all of which will fit on to the standard Euro pallet of 1200mm x 800mm in various combinations. The UK standard pallet size is 1200mm x 1000mm.

Moving your containers about on pallets is one thing, but if you have a fairly big storage area you can also buy a trolley or trollies, also known as dollies, for moving containers about. You might perhaps have a very large restaurant and need to move dirty ware from an area just behind the kitchen entrance across a space to get to your washing up area. You can simply stack plates, cutlery, glasses, etc into different dishwasher racks and then you can move them wherever you need them to go.

Many of the storage boxes that you can buy are stackable which means that they will take up a lot less space on your premises and also while in transit. Some of them have lids, and some of them do not, and your choice will depend on what you need to do with the contents. For instance, if you have to store items for a long time you will probably want storage boxes with lids which will keep dust out and therefore keep the contents clean.

Of course, for many items you will need dividers in the storage boxes, and these can vary enormously depending on your requirements. So you can get a storage container with dividers that will hold glasses, for example. Now glasses come in many different shapes and sizes. They can be different heights and many different widths. The Fries Rack System accommodates many different types of glassware, providing a standard size storage container with dividers for many different widths of glass and also a wide range of different heights. These containers have small pegs which come in different lengths and fit into the sides and corners of the container and can be used to raise the overall height of the container, or for that matter lower it, in order to accommodate any height of glass that you wish.

Some storage boxes that can be used for cutlery don’t have dividers, so the box can just be filled with dinner knives, soup spoons, or whatever. However, others do have dividers, such as some of the dishwasher cutlery racks which are divided into four sections, each of which can be used to hold a number of individual forks, spoons, and so on.

The type of storage boxes that you need, with or without dividers, will depend very much on your particular business and the quantity of different items that you need. Suffice it to say that there is a huge choice available, so there is bound to be something to cover your requirements.