Cold prep stations play a vital role in commercial kitchens. Staff use these spaces to lay out ingredients from the walk-in cooler and assemble them into menu items served cold. Cold prep areas also serve as the initial assembly points for dishes that will move on to the hot line for cooking.

For a new pizza restaurant, KECdesign created a triangular work setup in which pizza toppings are added from the cold prep table. The pizzas are parked momentarily on shelves directly above the prep table before an employee removes them to place in a nearby deck oven. When a pie is fully cooked, the staffer takes it out, turns around and then cuts and boxes the pizza on a cutting-board surface with more storage underneath. Photo courtesy KECdesignA poorly designed cold prep station costs operators extra in terms of labor hours, awkward workflow, higher energy usage, wasted space and perhaps compromised food quality or sanitation. But a well-thought-out chilled prep area keeps everything humming along.

Just ask Jeff Little, senior vice president for development at California-based quick-service Mexican chain Del Taco. The taco assembly bar serves as “the engine that makes our kitchens go,” he explains. “It’s the key piece of production equipment, so we needed to get it right.”

The chain was dissatisfied with a prior hot-and-cold taco prep setup that Little says was “antiquated,” with high costs for repair and maintenance. The prep area featured gas and water service for hot wells and a ceiling fan for ventilation, all of which added complexity. Del Taco turned to its equipment dealer, Avanti Restaurant Solutions, for help.

After months of testing and tweaks, “we ultimately got a state-of-the-art design customized to us, with elements that helped us progress on initial and lifecycle costs,” Little continues. The new fully electric and fully dry double-sided island-style taco prep bar “is easier to maintain. It isolates the hot and cold areas so it’s safer from a food safety standpoint. And we’ve also designed Del Taco pride into the equipment, since it’s color-coated in our signature Del Taco [red],” he notes. “Operators love to work from this bar.” And since it’s also visible from the dining room, “it helps signal to our customers that the food coming off that line is ‘Fresh as Del,’ with fresh ingredients compiled into items made to order just for them,” Little says.

The Equipment Battery for Cold Prep

For other types of restaurants, the cold food prep area may be more complicated.

“It entails handwashing sinks, prep sinks, worktables, specific space for cold plating and enough space to prepare everything,” says Cini•Little project manager Lisa Paige-Pretorius, who heads up the firm’s new office in the Charlotte, N.C., area. Depending on the restaurant’s needs, equipment found at cold prep stations could include cutting boards, knives, slicers, salad spinners, food processors, mixers, juicers, ice cream freezers, pasta machines, vacuum packing units, toasters, drawer warmers, a blast chiller/shock freezer and shelving for cold plates, as well as undercounter, mobile and upright refrigeration.

Specialty prep tables for sandwich assembly feature cold wells for ingredients that are level with a front counter that’s wide enough for staff to slide the bread along as ingredients are added. Photo courtesy KECdesignParticularly since the pandemic surge in mobile-enabled preorders over the past year, “prep spaces have been getting bigger,” Paige-Pretorius says. “There are more dedicated finishing stations, expo stations and bagging areas, so more dedicated space is needed for those. You’ve got monitors, bump bars and printers that you have to plan into the space, and the worker needs to be in the right location to see the monitor without having to turn around.”

Tod Roberts, contract design and equipment specialist at central Illinois-based KECdesign, notes that “cold prep could be one area in the kitchen — or three, four or five different areas — based on the menu, the items being prepared, the way they are being prepared and served. The salad station might be different from the pizza station, sandwich station or dessert stations.”

Roberts also says the rise in digital orders for takeout and delivery has affected the layout and design of cold prep. “Restaurants have had to pivot to make food orders more readily available to go out the back door, through the pass-out serving window or to the drive-thru,” he says. “We’ve had several restaurants that actually moved their kitchens around to get items out the door faster.” Fortunately, he says, wheeled, self-contained mobile prep tables with no drain were easy to move when kitchen layouts changed to expedite increased to-go orders.

What to Consider: Begin with Your Menu and Throughput

With multiple elements to juggle, there are some keys to setting up cold prep success, which include understanding the menu, labor components, the different types of prep tables available and how to maximize space.

“The key to a good prep space is understanding what you are currently doing, what you may be doing, and what you will never do,” advises Kristin Sedej, FCSI, principal and co-owner of Chicago-based S2O Consulting. “Understanding your goals and staffing levels helps you to include the right equipment in the right location for minimal steps and a clean process.”

For Paige-Pretorius, “it comes down to the chef — their requests, their menu, their budget. And then the space the equipment is going into and its restrictions and constraints. If it’s a wide-open kitchen and a really nice budget, you might do a custom station with a giant stainless counter, custom chef counter with cold rails and shelves.”

It’s also important to understand labor staffing when designing a prep area, Sedej advises. “Make sure that all staff have ample space to do their work; if only two people will be prepping, you don’t want to design a space that is spread out or has too many stations.” And think through the process, she adds: “The idea of prep is to take products from bulk for daily use. Understand what is needed to hold and support the products during each step. In addition to undercounter refrigeration, consider the prep station’s proximity to the walk-in or other bulk refrigeration. Having a hand sink and worktables with sinks close by is helpful. And always, convenient electric outlets!”

In a barbecue restaurant’s kitchen, the cold prep table holds garnishes like raw onions, cold sides like potato salad and coleslaw, and cold dipping sauces including ranch and blue cheese. It’s lined up with the adjacent hot prep table, from which staff can ladle out hot barbecue sauces and hot sides like beans. The meats are cooked in a smoker outside. Photo courtesy KECdesign

Analyze how staff will prepare each menu item, Roberts says, and plan workspace for tools including slicers, blenders, food processors and dicing equipment. Divide worktable space into separate meat and vegetable areas, he says. Refrigeration units that roll under the worktables can supplement the undercounter refrigeration built into cold prep tables.

Understanding the different types of prep tables is another important element. Higher-end chilled prep tables are cooled via refrigerated rails that wrap around the food wells, but lower-cost versions usually utilize chilled forced air blown around the bottoms and tops of the wells. Prep tables with wrap rails may be easier to clean and sanitize because they don’t have louvered vents where food products can get stuck, Roberts says. They may also maintain temperature better in hot environments, he adds.

Chilled prep tables can be designed specifically for sandwich assembly, with a flat rail and a cutting board surface on the front, or for pizza assembly, with enough surface space in front of the slightly raised wells for staff to slide the pizza along as they add toppings. The design of general-purpose cold prep includes flexible openings and adapter bars that can fit larger or smaller pans to serve different needs throughout the day. “If you have a breakfast daypart, you’ll need larger pans, but for lunch, if you have a menu that’s heavy on sandwiches or burgers, you might change to smaller pans on the same unit to hold toppings,” Paige-Pretorius says. She also notes some prep tables now allow operators to change out the hot and cold wells — useful on serving lines or in food courts, or for stations that prep both hot and cold sandwiches.

For California-based fast-food chain Del Taco, Avanti Restaurant Solutions designed an upgraded hot-and-cold taco prep area that isolates hot from cold areas, ensuring that both types of ingredients are in a food-safe temperature zone. Eliminating a water bath minimizes daily maintenance. The unit features not only stainless surfaces but also some in Del Taco’s signature red, underlining brand identity. Customers peeking into the kitchen through the service window view this space.Although standard prep tables with 115-volt plugs (or even large tables that require 208-volt outlets) are not a top energy drain in the commercial kitchen, operators can choose Energy Star-rated units that draw less electricity, and utility rebates may make them price competitive.

Cold prep tables can also be designed for remote refrigeration, with the compressor and condenser located outside the kitchen. Operators may specify these units in particularly hot kitchens, when kitchen space for cold prep is cramped or when there are numerous refrigeration units in the space.

Not enough room for cold prep? One alternative is to move cold prep out front. “One idea to maximize your space is to use your front-of-house servery spaces for prep, especially in the a.m., since it’s not uncommon for servery components to only partially open for breakfast,” suggests Sedej. “By strategically placing sinks and refrigeration in back counters, we have utilized the servery in addition to the back-of-house traditional spaces.”

Prep stations in the center of salad bars have also been popular, Sedej says, and not only with operators: “Guests like to see the food being produced in front of them.”