In Lincolnshire, England, primary schools rely on companies like The Farm Kitchen to provide fresh, healthy and delicious meals for their students. For 17 years, The Farm Kitchen has freshly cooked meals, packed them into food pans inside Cambro Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers®, put them into vans to be delivered.

“Every weekday, The Farm Kitchen uses hundreds of Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers to transport 5,500 meals to 60 schools around the city.”

“We are on our family farm, we use as much local produce as we can, make the meals as nutritious as we possibly can and deliver them. They’re all freshly made each morning; we don’t use packet mixes; we make them all ourselves,” said Victoria Howe, owner and director of The Farm Kitchen.

School employees are able to serve British favorites like sausage and mash directly out of the Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers, making lunch extremely easy to execute. Howe and her team simply pick up the carriers at the end of the day to clean them up and get them ready for the next day.

“We can easily lift [the Cambro carriers] and the school supervisors can easily lift them. It’s a one person job, not a two person job,” said Howe.

The most important job an insulated food transport unit has is to keep food at safe temperatures; Howe says the Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers go above and beyond what they need.

“We did a tasting the other day and we left the stuff in the van overnight to wash up in the morning and the tins underneath were still nearly too hot to hold; they’re good, they’re really good,” said Howe.

As if being easy to handle, temperature retentive, and efficient wasn’t enough, Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers can last decades. When asked how long Howe has used her Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers, she said:

“From day one—first [carriers] I bought! I think they perform the best. The insulation means that they really do work. I don’t see any need to buy anything else. Because they work and they work really well, and actually we’ve worked with other boxes. If a school already has their own boxes, we’ll use them. And we haven’t found any that were good,” said Howe.

Through ingredients, short local delivery routes, solar power usage, and reusable products like their Top Loading Ultra Pan Carriers, The Farm Kitchen continually looks for more ways to improve their carbon footprint. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ADRIANA DESIDERIO IS THE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER AT CAMBRO.