A Selection Of Some Of The Many Catering Ware Boxes Available

If you are in the catering industry, you will know just how important it is to be able to handle all of your ware, and if you are like most people you will have a lot of it. Even if you only run a pub which doesn’t serve food, you still have a lot of glasses to wash and in a lot of different shapes and sizes – whisky glasses, tumblers, pint glasses, half pint glasses, pint jugs, half pint jugs, sherry glasses, brandy glasses, wine glasses, champagne glasses, and more, and they all need careful handling and need to be washed and dried.

If you serve food, then you have dinner plates, side plates, cups, saucers, knives, forks, dessert spoons, tablespoons, wooden spoons, sweet dishes, kitchen scissors, cooking utensils, and so on. None of those are as delicate as glassware, but chinaware can still get damaged. About the only thing that is not very likely to get damaged is cutlery. Even so, it all needs washing and drying, and storing when not actually in use.

This is why there are so many different types of boxes and racks to handle all the different ware. Your plates will be of a different design and different size from the next caterer, and so manufacturers of boxes and racks have to produce a lot of different sizes in order to cope with all the different designs. Many plates used in restaurants aren’t even round any more, but are oblong.

Storage is one thing, but a very important consideration is washing and drying. The water needs to be able to get to all parts of the ware in order to remove food, lipstick, and so on, and the dryer needs to be able to push the warm air to all parts of the rack so that all of the ware is cleaned and dried perfectly. Although designed with the best of intentions, there are many dishwasher racks that don’t come up to scratch when push comes to shove.

Probably some of the best designed catering racks and boxes are those made by the Austrian company Fries. They have really gone the extra mile in order to produce boxes and racks which do the job perfectly. Take their glass racks for the dishwasher. These have been designed so that the ventilated sides and bases allow the water to penetrate everywhere within the rack in order to clean the glasses perfectly, including the dreaded lipstick. Then when the glasses go through the dryer the air can get to all parts in order to dry them properly. They even have a system which allows you to tilt wine glasses, sherry glasses, and so on, so that the water doesn’t sit in the base of the glass but drips off it.

Then they allow for glasses of all different heights with their Customrack 500 design which can be adjusted and customised to fit glasses by simply changing over the "legs" at the corners of the rack to longer or shorter ones as required. This allows for 11 different heights of glasses from 73mm to 260mm. The racks are also available in seven different frame colours which makes it easy to place the right glasses in the right rack and also easy to identify the glasses that you want from storage. They also have coding clips in different colours which can just be clipped on to a rack and serve as another way to identify the glasses.

In addition, they have six different inserts which can be inserted into the racks and allow for them to hold anywhere from 16 to 44 glasses, depending on the width.

Fries also produce a cutlery box which has a pyramid shaped base in it. This allows the cutlery box to spread the cutlery so that it doesn’t all stick together and makes the washing and drying process perfect.

Then there are plate racks with different types of inserts for holding plates and saucers, and cup racks that ensure that tea and coffee cups are cleaned perfectly. They also have tray racks for holding serving trays, but which would also double for holding the oblong plates that a lot of establishments use today. There really is a rack that serves your every need.

Caterbox is a leading supplier of catering boxes and racks, including the whole of the Fries range with the pyramid-based cutlery box. In total, the company stocks over 1,000 different designs and models so there is bound to be the right box or rack for your business.