What goes wrong in kitchen projects.

1. No unambiguous concept

There is an area, a budget and a number of meals — but no binding answer to the questions behind them: what will be produced here, by which cooking method, for whom, at what time and with how many people? As long as that stays open, every party carries on planning against their own assumption.

You can recognise it by the same question resurfacing in meetings in ever new guises. Correcting it is cheap while it happens on paper — and grows more expensive with every week in which work continued on the basis of individual assumptions.

2. Kitchen planning brought in too late

The most common and most consequential point. The kitchen is treated as equipment and procured accordingly late — although it touches the building in more places than almost any other trade. Anyone who joins once the room layout, the shafts and the services routing are fixed can only optimise within someone else's constraints.

More on this in our article Why commercial kitchen planning belongs in the project early.

3. Service shafts fixed too late

Extract air from a commercial kitchen is not a side issue. It needs cross-section, a route all the way above roof level, fire protection and acoustic separation — and it competes with everything else in the building that wants to go upwards. If the shaft is only looked for once the shell is standing, the position of the kitchen has effectively already been decided.

The consequences are detours, reduced cross-sections, additional fire dampers and more pressure loss, which costs energy permanently. In the worst case the kitchen ends up where the shaft was possible — not where the workflow needed it.

4. No clear waterproofing concept

A commercial kitchen is a wet area with floor gullies, channels, daily cleaning and heavy equipment on adjustable feet. Waterproofing, floor build-up, falls, gully positions and equipment feet have to be fixed together, otherwise they will not match.

This is the most unpleasant point on the list, because it only becomes visible after handover — and because correcting it means opening the floor again. In a kitchen that is running, that is not a construction problem but an operational one.

5. Interfaces left unclear

Who sets the floor gully, who runs the services and how far, who makes the final connection, who installs the equipment? The classic candidates are always the same: connections behind appliances, waterproofing beneath appliances, supply air in ancillary rooms, suspensions for conveying technology, data points at tills and servery stations.

Whatever is not clearly assigned to anyone will either be planned twice or not at all. Both only surface on site, and on site time is the most expensive commodity there is.

6. The knowledge never reaches the installing trade

Between finished design and installation lies a handover that is routinely underestimated. If the site does not know why a piece of equipment stands exactly there, in which sequence installation has to happen and which tolerance is critical, deviations arise that look harmless one by one.

Together they change the workflow: a workstation where staff now have to turn around; a route that is ten paces longer every day; a connection that gets in the way of cleaning. None of these are defects in a legal sense — they still cost time every single day.

7. Dining hall and servery underestimated

The kitchen is planned as engineering, the guest area as furnishing. Yet acceptance or rejection is decided in the guest area: at the counter, on the way through the room, at the table. In many buildings it is also the larger part of the task in terms of floor area.

What is missing here cannot later be replaced with furniture. Acoustics, zoning, power at the table and the way the queue is organised are structural decisions. More on this on our page Planning a staff restaurant.

8. Saving in the place where it comes back

When a project becomes more expensive than planned, the cut almost always falls on whatever is easiest to remove: a servery station, the second floor gully, automation in the dishwash area, the reserve in the connected load, ventilation in an ancillary room.

It is cut once; it is then missing every year. Usually in staff hours — and staff, alongside energy, is the largest cost block in operation. A saving in the capital cost that raises the operating cost is not a saving. It is a transfer into a budget that no one reviews again.

What this feels like inside a project.

A recurring sequence, with no reference to any particular scheme: we join when the building design is already well advanced — and start with our own concept stage. That sounds like a formality and is the heart of the problem. From that moment two design processes run alongside each other at completely different levels of maturity.

The room layout has been made by then — carefully and to the best of everyone's knowledge, but without experience of kitchen workflows. The result is rooms that look plausible individually and do not work in sequence: routes that cross where they must not. A room too small for its job. Another unnecessarily large, costing time every day in operation.

What follows is no longer design but damage limitation: the aim is no longer to build the best concept, but the best concept within what is already fixed. People experiencing this for the first time tend to think of it as bad luck. It is a scheduling problem.