Introducing The Ingredients Box

Ingredients Box

The innovative Ingredients Box for School Food Technology Lessons ( a.k.a.the ‘Gredi-Box’), has been designed in the UK to overcome two problem areas. The first problem being the amount of individual containers needed to take a variety of different ingredients to school for cooking classes and the second problem is supplying another container to bring the finished items home.

The ‘OVENU‘ designed ingredients box provides two solutions in one and incorporates a host of features and benefits for pupils, teachers and parents.

NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY DIRECTLY FROM THIS SITE


The design has a truly modern feel and the use of only Hygiene Grade materials means the ingredients box is both practical and durable to meet the needs of all concerned.

The ‘Gredi-Box’ consists of three main parts. A 75mm deep partitioned base to place pre-prepared items for many popular school recipes using just the correct quantity of ingredients.

In the middle, a strong clear central membrane to keep the ingredients fresh and dry during transport and finally, a tough 75mm deep lid to store then finished meal on it’s way home.

(The lid section can also be used for taking more ‘bulky’ items that are required for some recipes safely into school).

All three items are held tightly together with three sturdy exterior clips.

Also included free in the first production batch of ingredients boxes is a permanent marker pen for the boxes to be personalised with the children’s name on the panel provided.

Plus

A bag of 100 free mini-bags to enable children to take small quantities of solids or liquids into school. The mini-bags are ideal for ‘teaspoon’ measures and have a secure self-seal top.

Plus

4 free 100ml bottles are supplied with the ‘Gredi-Box’.

2 bottles have smaller screw caps and these are for the safe transport of pre-measured liquids into school for cooking classes.

The 2 bottles with the larger screw caps can also be used for liquids if required but the principle idea is to use these items to bring eggs into school. Having 2 bottles means that, if the recipe requires, egg yolks and/or egg whites can both be brought safely to school.

All these features and more for around £3.00 a year during the compulsory Food Technology Cooking Classes period

You can find all the extra information you’ll need explaining the original idea, the huge savings to be made, the material specifications, PTA information and how to be one of the first owners of a ‘Gredi-Box’,  by clicking either the tabs at the bottom of this page or the buttons to the left.

We hope you agree that the ‘Gredi-Box’ is truly innovative and a ‘must have’ accessory for the next school term.

Use the PayPal link at the top of the page to buy your Ingredients Box

Huge Savings

One of the main objectives of the ingredients box is to save parents hundreds of pounds during the three years that children are compulsorily required to attend cooking classes.

By having numerous compartments within the item this enables children to take just the right amount of ingredients to school. This idea alone should save hundreds of pounds worth of potential waste.

As one of the designers told us, “My wife and I have just sent one of our children to school with over £12.00 worth of ingredients for a school recipe that should have been a couple of pounds! Our child was sent with numerous bottles, jars and full packets of ingredients as we simply didn’t have enough containers at home to put the various bits and pieces into. It was just easier to buy whole packets of things!”

By simply taking a few minutes with children weighing and measuring just the correct quantity of items that are probably already in the kitchen cupboard will save parents an awful lot of money.

This exercise will also get children involved in the preparation of food prior to lessons and give them a better understanding of what goes into many food dishes. This could also save a lot of valuable time in the lessons themselves.

We’ve calculated that if children attend between 30 and 40 cooking classes a year and just saving a mere ONE POUND a lesson by reducing waste then, over a three year period the initial investment of an ingredients box will be repaid ten times over! A saving of £2.50 per lesson would repay the initial outlay nearly twenty times over during the compulsory period.

“This specially made product will definitely save parents a lot of money.”

And it’s not just the savings on ingredients that need to be taken into account! The designer above added “I think we’ve probably only ever seen half of what our children have made at school because they never took a suitable container to school to bring home what they had made……it ended up in the school bin….what a waste!”

“By the time we’ve added on the cost of plastic pots we have supplied that haven’t made it home either, the cost just goes up and up.”

We hope you agree!

Use the PayPal link at the top of the page to buy your Ingredients Box

The Ingredients Box Idea

The original idea for an ingredients box for schools was put forwards a couple of years ago and has progressed since then through all the stages to the item that’s now available.

The initial idea was to produce a promotional item for clients that used the OVENU oven valeting service as there is a huge amount of synergy between cooking in an oven and cleaning it!

This idea, coupled with first hand experience of the designer who had two teenage children at secondary school, has led to the evolution of the ingredients box for schools.

We also wanted to save parents millions of pounds a year!

It quickly became apparent that a ‘give-away’ item would be somewhat flimsy and wouldn’t meet the high standards required both from an OVENU perspective and that of the end user. The OVENU oven valeting service has always stood for quality, value and service.

To that end, a far more substantial and practical item needed to be designed, manufactured and tested to meet the strict criteria on plastic products and the quality that is representative of the OVENU Trademark.

There seemed little point or purpose in providing an item to a potential market of nearly half a million young people a year that wasn’t going to fit the bill!

The design project was contracted to a UK firm and work started to produce a tough, practical item that would ‘tick all the boxes’ and subsequently represent superb value for money.

Attention to detail was top of the agenda in the design brief and we hope you’ll agree that this criteria has been met. We certainly do and, to back our belief, the ingredients box is guaranteed to be free of any manufacturing defects for a full 12 months.

We needed a box that could be used to safely transport just the correct amount of ingredients into school in the first instance and the box should also have a separate compartment for the prepared food to make it safely back home.

It was mentioned during the design stage that very few schools needed pupils to bring eggs into cooking classes. A shame really as many parents still enjoy home-made sponge cakes in particular!

It was easy to work out why many school recipes didn’t include eggs!

Much design time was spent attempting to produce a container that would be suitable for children to take to school that contained eggs in their shells. After much deliberation, the penny finally dropped that this idea was fundamentally flawed. The most sensible and practical idea would be for the eggs to be ‘broken’ at home and then taken to school in separate plastic bottles that had a secure screw-on top.

Hindsight is a fabulous thing!

Hence the inclusion of two free bottles within the ingredients box for this specific purpose with wide aperture lids. The wide lids allow eggs to be broken directly into the bottles or, if needed, the eggs can be separated into yolks/whites and put into different bottles…a perfect solution and no ‘scrambled egg’ mixture created in the children’s rucksack on the way to school!

Two extra 100 ml bottles with smaller diameter lids are also included for transporting various liquids that have been pre measured at home.

Ideas just kept coming in during the design stage… one of which was a question raised about including something to transport small teaspoon quantities of ingredients.

The perfect solution here was to source self-seal ‘mini-bags’. 100 of these bags are included FREE with the ingredients box as these are ideal for holding salt, pepper, other seasonings and even small amounts of ketchup, mayonnaise, lemon juice etc. This idea saves children having to take whole bottles to school!

The final idea was to include a panel on the ingredients box for children to write their name on for easy identification. This panel has been incorporated along with a complimentary marker pen especially for this purpose.

We hope that all the ideas have come together nicely and if there are any further improvements that you feel we could make to the ingredients box, please let us know.

We trust that our product will serve your children well during their time in cooking classes and that you’ll also enjoy the prepared food that comes home!

Use the PayPal link at the top of the page to buy your Ingredients Box