Refurbished Commercial Kitchen Furniture

It is one of the best used buys in a kitchen. A commercial bench is a stainless top on a stainless frame with nothing to go wrong, so condition is cosmetic and structural rather than mechanical. Scratches on a top are normal and do not affect how it works.

Commercial tops are stainless steel, and 304 is the food-safety grade used in Australian kitchens. What to look at is flatness, the welds at the legs and any sink corners, and whether the feet still adjust. A bench that rocks or has a cracked weld is the one to leave.

Measure what you have first. Commercial benching is built to a handful of common working heights and most used pieces land in that range, but a second-hand bench comes in the height it was made in, with adjustable feet for fine tuning only.

Depth is the other one to check, because a shallower bench in the middle of a run leaves a step that gets caught on. Where the match is close, a stainless infill strip solves it for far less than waiting for the perfect size to turn up in one-off stock.

Stability before looks. Check table bases for wobble and for the fixing between the base and the top, and check chair joints by sitting and rocking rather than by looking. Front-of-house furniture in a venue takes a hard, constant life, and a loose joint only gets looser. Tops and bases are sold separately in the new range as cafe table tops and cafe table bases.

Then think about matching quantity. A cafe needs a consistent set, and second-hand stock arrives in the numbers it arrives in. If you need twenty matching chairs, tell us early, because that is a harder ask than any single piece.

Back of house, freely — nobody minds whether a shelf unit is new, and matching only matters where surfaces butt together. That is where most operators save the most money on a fit-out.

Front of house, be more careful. Mismatched chairs read as mismatched, and a room that looks assembled from leftovers is harder to charge properly in. A reasonable split is refurbished back of house and new where customers sit, or refurbished front of house in matched sets only. Commercial kitchen tables and commercial cafe benches cover both sides.

Stainless or coated wire shelving rated for the load and the environment. A dry store can take coated wire; a wash-up area or a coolroom needs stainless or a coating that will not corrode. Commercial cool room shelving is built for the latter.

Think about the depth and the span before the material. Shelves that are too deep mean stock at the back is lost, and a span that is too long will bow under weight. Commercial kitchen wall shelves free up bench space where the floor is full.

Work from the walls in. Measure each wall run, note where the services and the doors are, then look at what is in stock and build the run from the pieces that exist rather than designing a layout and hoping to find it. Used furniture rewards flexibility on sizes.

Buy the fixed pieces first — the benching along the walls and the shelving above it — then fill with trolleys and mobile units, which do not have to match anything. Send us your wall lengths and the services and we will tell you what the current refurbished commercial kitchen furniture stock can cover.