This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Cook’s Buyers Guide for Corrections. Many of our customers know Cook’s best from the catalog as well as having connected with our expert sales representatives and/or our knowledgeable customer service team. The unifying characteristic behind our Buyers Guide, top-notch sales and our customer service teams is our knowledge and understanding of foodservice in corrections. At Cook’s, everything that we do is focused on making meal serving in jails and prisons as safe as it can be for foodservice operators, correctional officers and inmates.
It’s this focus that sparked the creation of the first Buyers Guide for Corrections in 1997. Having worked in operations for many years, our founder also had the unique experience of managing the foodservice within a correctional facility as well as working on correctional kitchen renovations and new construction. Project after project, the lack of commercial foodservice equipment and smallwares that were well suited for the correctional kitchen was apparent. More importantly, the realization that a solution was needed not just for our founder’s benefit, but for the whole industry, became the spark that ignited a business. And now many years later, here we are with a 212 page correctional foodservice equipment and supply catalog, a website, a sales and customer service team, a state contract team and project team.
Along with the growth in the company, there has been the creation of Cook’s Brand, a line of products expressly created to meet the unique demands of the correctional kitchen. These products are available exclusively from Cook’s. Throughout the Cook’s Catalog, you’ll find ‘Problem Solved’ callouts that highlight the inspiration for many of the Cook’s Brand products. A common denominator in our Cook’s Brand product development is that many of our items started from a conversation with a customer that inspired us to create a product that solved their problem. Items like our Flex Trays, Sentry Series Sporks, High Security Tool Lockers are all items designed to improve safety meal serving and in the correctional kitchen.
Each day we talk to foodservice professionals, operators and CO’s and vendors, and in all of our conversations, the underlying goal is for our products and our services to support our goal of making meal serving in correctional facilities safe.
