Used Takeaway Equipment for Sale: What a Small Unit Actually Needs

You have signed for the unit, or you are close to it, and you have a number in your head. Search used takeaway equipment for sale and you get pages of single machines listed one at a time, which is very little help when what you are actually buying is a whole shop's worth of kit in one go.

A takeaway is not a small restaurant. It is a narrow unit with a counter across the front, a cook line down one wall and whatever is left over for everything else. The kit has to fit that, and it has to be bought in an order, because every decision locks in the next one. Here is the list, and here is the order.

What a Takeaway Actually Needs, and What Can Wait

Front to back, a takeaway unit fills up like this.

• Frying. For most takeaway menus this is the first and the busiest machine in the shop, and one tank is rarely enough once you are frying two things that must not taste of each other.
• A range or a griddle. Which one depends entirely on the menu. A chip shop may never need a six burner range. A kebab or burger shop lives off a griddle and a grill. A pizza shop needs neither and needs a deck oven instead.
• Extraction over the cook line. Not an accessory. It is the item everything else gets built around.
• Hot holding and display. Anything that sits on the counter waiting for a customer has to be held properly, not kept warm by hope.
• Prep and under-counter refrigeration. Within reach of the cook line, because nobody walks to the back of the shop in the middle of a service.
• A freezer. Most takeaway menus run off frozen stock, so this is not the optional item it might be in a restaurant.
• Stainless benching and a sink run. Every job in the shop happens on a bench, and the sinks decide where the drainage goes.
• Warewashing. A dishwasher if the space and the drainage allow it, a pot sink if they do not.
• Shelving. Dry goods, packaging, boxes. Takeaway packaging eats far more storage than new operators expect.

Now split that list in two. What you cannot open the doors without is the cook line, the extraction over it, the sink run, refrigeration for whatever you prep daily, and hot holding if food is going to sit on the counter at all. What can genuinely wait until month three is the dishwasher, the second freezer, the spare benching, most of the racking and any display beyond the one you need on day one. Buy those when they turn up cheap, not when you are under pressure.

One thing to settle early rather than late. Ask your local environmental health team what they expect of the unit before you buy sinks or site the hand wash. Moving a sink afterwards means moving drainage, and that is building work, not shopping.

The Order You Buy It In

This is the part nobody tells you, and it is where the money goes missing.

The cook line and the extraction get decided together. Not one and then the other. Together, in the same week. What you are frying and grilling sets what the extraction above it has to cope with, and the canopy you can physically hang in that unit sets how much cook line will fit underneath it. Decide either one on its own and you will be paying to fix the other.

Refrigeration next. It goes in the space the cook line leaves behind, and in a takeaway that is usually a narrow run opposite or behind the line. Measure the gap that is actually left before you buy anything with a door on it, because the door has to open in that gap with somebody standing in it.

Holding and display after that, sized to your service rather than to your ambition. A counter unit bigger than your throughput dries food out and costs you money to run all day. This is also the point to settle wet heat against dry heat, because that one decision drives everything else about a used hot food display cabinet, and it depends on whether your menu has to stay crisp.

Benching, shelving and storage last. It is the cheapest kit in the shop to change your mind about, it comes up used constantly, and nothing else in the fit-out waits on it.

The classic mistake is buying the cheap range first. It is the item that comes up cheapest and most often, so it is the easiest thing to say yes to in week one. Then the extraction gets specified around a range that was chosen on price rather than on the menu, and either the canopy costs more than the range ever saved or the range goes back out at a loss to suit the canopy. Buying in the wrong order is how one cheap machine turns into an expensive fit-out.

Buy These Used Without Losing Sleep

Fryers. Heavily built, mechanically simple, and the things that fail on them are things you can see and test in front of the seller. Fryers are also the item a takeaway is most likely to need two of, which makes new pricing hurt twice. Work through a proper used commercial fryer buying checklist before you hand over any money, because the difference between a good used fryer and a bad one is an inspection, not a price.

Stainless benching, tables and sinks. There is nothing in a bench to go wrong. Dents and scratches do not affect how it works. In a takeaway you will want more benching than you first think and you will keep wanting it, so buy every usable piece you find at the right size.

Shelving and racking. Same logic, and a takeaway burns through storage faster than a restaurant because of the packaging.

Hot holding, with one condition. Buy it used only if you can watch it come up to temperature and hold there with food in it. A cabinet that gets there empty in a quiet showroom tells you nothing about a Friday.

Refrigeration, where you can see it run. Not a body sitting cold and switched off in a lock-up. Ask the seller to plug it in when you arrive, then look at everything else in the shop and come back to it before you decide.

Do Not Buy These Used for a Takeaway

Extraction that has spent years over a fryer. Frying is the dirtiest duty there is. Years of it leave grease everywhere the eye does not reach, and you inherit all of it along with somebody else's cleaning record.

A canopy sized for a different cook line. It is the single most common bargain on the used market and the single worst one for a takeaway, for the reason in the next section.

Gas kit with nothing behind it on paper. A cheap gas range with no history is not a cheap gas range. It is a machine that has to satisfy an engineer before it earns a penny.

Hot holding that cannot hold through a rush. A takeaway counter is loaded and emptied repeatedly for hours. A tired cabinet that copes with a gentle lunch will not cope with a Friday night, and you will be finding that out in public.

Anything with a proprietary part and no parts network behind it. In a takeaway, one dead machine can close the shop, because there is rarely a second one to fall back on. Before you buy anything unfamiliar, find out who sells the parts for it in this country and how long they take to arrive.

Extraction: The Item That Decides the Layout

Extraction is not a machine you add at the end. It is the thing that decides what cook line fits, where it sits and how tall it can be, and in a small unit it also decides where everything else goes.

A canopy has to suit the cook line going underneath it, not the cook line it came out of. That is what makes used canopies so risky. The canopy came off a working kitchen, so it looks proven, but it was sized and ducted for somebody else's menu in somebody else's room. A takeaway frying all day is about the hardest duty you can put over a cook line, and a canopy that was doing a gentler job somewhere else can look perfect and still be wrong.

Get professional input on this before you buy a canopy, a range or a fryer, and let the specification be theirs rather than yours. It is the one item on this list where a mistake does not just cost money, it holds up your opening, because nothing else can be finally positioned until the extraction is settled.

The Gas Question, and Who Has to Sign It Off

This is where takeaway fit-outs get stuck, and it stops most people who buy the range before they understand it.

HSE states that in workplaces such as shops and restaurants, work on gas fittings must be carried out by a Gas Safe registered engineer who is qualified to do the work, and that it is illegal for anyone else to do it. The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 put it plainly at regulation 3(1): "No person shall carry out any work in relation to a gas fitting or gas storage vessel unless he is competent to do so." Commercial catering is its own category of competence, so check that the categories on the back of an engineer's card actually cover it.

What a seller can hand you is the machine, the data plate, and whatever service history and old paperwork they happen to have. What they cannot hand you is a sign-off for your unit. Commissioning follows the installation, not the appliance. The certificate from the shop it came out of proves it was safe there, in that room, on that pipework, with that extraction over it.

Your engineer will also look at the interlock between the gas and the extraction, and whether that arrangement is acceptable is their judgement, not the seller's and not yours. That is why a range that looks cheap on the listing stops looking cheap at sign-off, and it is worth reading the second hand catering equipment gas safety rules before you commit to gas at all. If the sums are tight, price the electric version of the same job before you decide, because the sign-off is part of the price of the gas one.

Get your engineer booked before the kit arrives, not after, and get what they need from you in writing by email so nothing is lost between you.

Measuring a Takeaway Unit Before You Buy Anything

A shop unit is the tightest space in the trade, and it was almost never designed for what you are about to put in it.

Measure the gap behind the front counter first. That gap, not the width of the shop, is what your cook line actually has. Then measure the route the kit has to travel to get there. A takeaway is usually entered through a public shop front, which means a doorway, then a counter flap or a gap, then often a corridor that was never meant to take a range on a trolley. Plenty of units have steps at the back, a raised threshold, or no rear access at all, so everything comes in the front and comes through the same tight doorway twice, once into the shop and once again into the kitchen.

Power decides as much as space does. Find out whether the unit has three phase or single phase, and look at the board and the spare ways yourself before you buy, not after the machine is standing in the shop. A used machine bought at a good price can still be the most expensive item in the fit-out if the supply has to be upgraded to run it. That check costs you nothing and it takes ten minutes with the landlord or the outgoing tenant.

• Measure the gap behind the front counter, because that is the width your cook line really has
• Measure the doorway, the counter gap, the corridor and every internal door the kit has to pass through
• Check for steps, a raised threshold or no rear access, and decide now how the heavy items get in
• Photograph the electrical board and count the spare ways before you agree a price on anything electric
• Find out whether the unit has three phase, and what bringing it in would involve if it does not
• Get the canopy and the cook line specified together, before you buy either one
• Write down what you cannot open without and what waits until month three, then buy in that order

Fitting out a takeaway is not one purchase, it is thirty, and the order you make them in decides what the whole thing costs. Get the list down on paper, settle the cook line and the extraction in the same conversation, and leave the easy kit until last. Buy well, sell on what you do not need, and the rest looks after itself: BUY • SELL • SAVE.

Ready to Kit Out a Takeaway?

CaterBids is fixed price, never an auction, so the price on the listing is the price you pay. It carries new and used side by side, which is the right way round for a fit-out, because the benching is worth buying used and the one machine your whole menu depends on might not be. We are in beta and the number of listings is still growing, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise. On the search page you can filter by condition, new or used, and by location.

If you are clearing a kitchen as well as filling one, every account gets one free listing, then a listing is £5 for 30 days live with up to 6 photos and buyer messages included, and we take no cut of the sale.

Write your list, settle the extraction question, then browse what is listed on CaterBids and see what is on there today. Anything you want to ask us goes by email or through the chat on the site.