Time To Stand Up For Regen Ovens

Poor old regen ovens: as the spotlight falls on school dinners, they’ve been tarred with the brush of junk food. Now UK manufacturer Moffat has stepped in to put the record straight: regen ovens are every bit us useful and versatile as before – and the quality of food that comes out of them is dependent purely on the quality of food that goes in.

“Of course we fully support the move to better school dinners,” says Moffat’s Sales Director Gary Allen. “But on the equipment side there is a lot of misunderstanding and misplaced concern, especially about regen ovens.

“The point about regen ovens is that they are the ideal tool to bulk-cook chilled and fresh foods in a school meals situation,” he says. “Most school catering organisations will continue to use cook chill, because it is one of the best ways to deliver top quality, nutritious school meals – the regen oven is the perfect way to prepare them and hold them for service.”

Gary Allen is keen to stress that regeneration is superb for freshly cooked meals and emphasises again that the quality of the final meal is dependent on what you put in. “Regen doesn’t mean simply reheating prepacked meals. It means you can prepare fresh dinners in advance and then serve them to the children at the right time and temperature with no loss in quality.”


Moffat’s range of regen ovens for schools includes the V-gen trolleys and units designed to fit into servery counters – so caterers can even regen and serve from the same station. This versatility makes regen ovens one of the school caterers’ most valuable pieces of cooking equipment.

“The trolleys are particularly popular in satellite schools with no catering facilities,” says Gary Allen. “A central production kitchen can freshly cook then blast chill the meal, which will be transported to the satellite school, popped in the regen trolley and served to the children. When the meal is over, the trolley can be wheeled out of the way until lunch time tomorrow.”

After 40 years experience of supplying cooking equipment for school catering, Moffat is one of the market’s best known manufacturers.

Posted by Kyli Haynes on Tue 10 May 2005