The Essential Restaurant Equipment Guide for Takeout and Delivery

Most restaurant equipment lists were written for a dining room. They walk you through the cookline, the walk-in, the dish pit, and they stop. That list is still right, as far as it goes. It just no longer describes where the orders are coming from.

Nearly 75% of all restaurant traffic now happens off-premises, according to the National Restaurant Association’s Off-Premises Restaurant Trends report, and 65% of limited-service operators offer delivery. A kitchen built only for plates leaving through a server’s hands will run that second stream of orders badly: tickets get missed, bags sit on a prep table losing heat, and the one person expediting is also the person bagging.

This guide covers the full equipment line-up for a restaurant that cooks for a dining room and for a steady flow of takeout and delivery at the same time. Every station, what it costs, and the order to buy it in. Where a decision has its own depth — whether to buy a unit used or new, or how to get the consumables side under control by buying restaurant supplies in bulk — you’ll get the short version here and a link to the long one.

The Bottom Line

• Off-premises is the main event, not an add-on. Nearly three-quarters of restaurant traffic happens off-premises, and 90% of consumers say they would order a greater variety of food if quality held up during delivery.
• Two order streams need two paths through the kitchen. The cookline can be shared. The ticket routing, the holding, and the packing space cannot.
• Budget $30,000–$80,000 for kitchen and cooking equipment in a typical new restaurant, with equipment and smallwares running 25–35% of total startup cost in a scratch build.
• Holding and packing are the cheapest fixes with the biggest effect. A heated holding cabinet and two feet of dedicated bagging counter do more for delivery quality than a better oven.
• Buy in this order: code-required infrastructure, then your primary cooking equipment, then cold storage, then holding and packing, then nice-to-haves.
• Gas cooking equipment is the safest thing to buy used. Refrigeration and anything with a circuit board is the riskiest.

What Changes About Restaurant Equipment When You Run Takeout and Delivery

A dine-in order has a built-in buffer. The food goes on a plate, a server carries it thirty feet, and the guest eats it within a minute. Nothing has to survive a wait.

A takeout or delivery order has three waits built into it. It waits for the rest of the ticket to finish. It waits for a driver or a customer to arrive. Then it waits in a bag, in a car, for however long the drive takes. Equipment that was good enough for the first scenario starts failing visibly in the third.

That shapes three equipment decisions in particular:

• You need somewhere to hold finished food at temperature. The FDA Food Code sets 135°F as the floor for hot holding, and a heat lamp over a stainless counter will not reliably keep a closed container of pasta there for twelve minutes.
• You need a physical place to assemble orders. Bagging on the pass means bagging in the way of the expo. Bagging on a prep table means cross-contamination questions and a cold product.
• You need tickets to arrive where the work happens. Online orders, third-party marketplace orders and phone orders all have to land on the same cookline as the dining room without anyone retyping them. That’s a hardware problem as much as a software one, and it usually gets solved with a kitchen printer at each station or a screen.

One more thing worth settling early: the equipment list is a conversation with your supplier, not a shopping cart. Lead times, install, and who services the unit in two years matter more than the sticker price, which is why choosing a restaurant supplier is a decision you want made before you start ordering, not after.

Cooking Equipment for a Kitchen Running Two Order Streams

Your primary cooking equipment is set by your menu, not by your channel mix. A pizzeria needs a deck or conveyor oven. A burger concept needs a griddle or charbroiler. That doesn’t change because half the orders leave in a bag.

What channel mix changes is capacity and recovery. Delivery and takeout orders arrive in clusters, because people order at the same times. A griddle that comfortably handles a steady dining room will stall when eleven tickets print in four minutes.

The core list for most concepts:

• A range or cooktop, gas or induction, sized to your busiest hour rather than your average one.
• A primary production piece: a combi oven, convection oven, deck oven, or conveyor oven depending on the menu. Combi ovens cost more up front and earn it back in flexibility, because the same cabinet roasts, steams, holds and reheats.
• Fryers, if you fry at all, with a recovery time you’ve actually checked. Fried food is the item that suffers most in a delivery bag, and underpowered fryers make it worse by dropping oil temperature under load.
• A charbroiler or griddle for anything cooked to order on a flat surface.
• Ventilation and fire suppression over the cookline. This is not optional and not a place to improvise; it’s code, it’s inspected, and it dictates where everything else can sit.
• Food prep equipment sized to batch work rather than à la carte. Off-premises menus reward batching, so a mixer and a commercial food processor often pay for themselves faster than a second burner does.

A full commercial line runs $50,000–$150,000, and a quick-service or fast-casual build typically lands in that same $50,000–$150,000 band once you include refrigeration and installation, according to 2026 startup cost breakdowns. A 2,000–3,000 square foot full-service kitchen can reach $75,000–$250,000.

Refrigeration and Cold Storage for a Delivery Kitchen

Refrigeration is where off-premises volume quietly strains a kitchen. More orders means more prepped components held cold, more sauce portions, more packaged sides waiting to be dropped in a bag.

What you need:

• A walk-in cooler if you have the footprint, or reach-ins if you don’t. Walk-ins cost more to install and far less per cubic foot of usable space.
• A walk-in or reach-in freezer sized to your frozen inventory plus the bulk buys you plan to make.
• Undercounter and worktop refrigeration on the line, so cooks aren’t walking to the walk-in mid-ticket.
• A prep table with a refrigerated rail for assembly-heavy menus.
• Cold holding for finished items: salads, desserts and bottled drinks, within arm’s reach of where orders get bagged, not across the kitchen.

Refrigeration is also the category where buying new usually wins. A compressor that dies takes your inventory with it, and the failure tends to happen on the hottest day of the year, when every service company is already booked.

Food Holding and Warming Equipment for Takeout Orders

This is the station most kitchens doing delivery are missing, and it’s the one that shows up in reviews.

A heated holding cabinet is an insulated box with humidity control that keeps cooked food at service temperature for a defined window without drying it out. For a kitchen sending out bagged food, it does something a heat lamp cannot: it holds the first three items of a six-item ticket while the last three cook.

The practical kit:

• A heated holding cabinet or proofer-holder, full-height or undercounter. Undercounter models fit under the pass and cost a fraction of a full-height unit.
• A heat lamp or strip warmer over the pass for the final thirty seconds, not for holding.
• Soup wells or a steam table if your menu includes anything ladled.
• Temperature-controlled pickup lockers, if your takeout volume justifies them. These give customers and drivers a self-serve collection point, which takes the “is order 4417 ready?” conversation off your counter entirely. They’re a real investment, so they come after the basics.
• A thermometer you actually use. Holding temperature is a number you verify, not a setting you trust.

Hold times are worth writing down and enforcing. The point of holding equipment is to protect a window of ten or fifteen minutes, not to park food for an hour.

The Packing and Expediting Station Most Kitchens Forget

Walk into a kitchen that added delivery without adding space and you’ll find the packing station on the floor: bags stacked on a milk crate, labels on a clipboard, someone taping lids on the corner of the pass.

A dedicated packing station is mostly shelving and counter, which makes it the best-value equipment purchase in this entire guide. What belongs there:

• Two to four feet of counter that isn’t the pass and isn’t a prep surface.
• Container and bag storage above and below, organized by size, so nobody hunts.
• A label printer or a label slot, with the order name and contents visible from the outside of the bag.
• A staging shelf divided into numbered slots for completed orders, so a driver can find one bag without opening three.
• A tape dispenser and seal stickers. Tamper seals are a small cost that resolves a whole category of customer complaints about missing or opened items.

Lay it out so a driver’s path to it never crosses the cookline. That single decision prevents most of the friction between kitchen staff and drivers.

Who stands at the station is the other half of the question. On a busy night, bagging and checking orders is a role, not a spare-moment task, and most kitchens that struggle with off-premises accuracy are short a person rather than short a shelf. If you’re mapping out who does what, the rundown of restaurant positions and what each one covers is a useful starting point.

Insulated Carriers and Transport Equipment for Delivery Runs

Once the bag leaves the building, the only equipment protecting your food is insulation. Food quality on arrival drives repeat ordering: 90% of consumers told the National Restaurant Association they’d order a greater variety of items if the food held up in transit.

What’s worth owning:

• Insulated delivery bags in at least two sizes, enough that some are always clean and dry. Buy more than you think you need; they get wet, they get left in cars, and a soggy bag insulates nothing.
• Rigid insulated carriers for anything stacked: catering trays, pizza boxes, large multi-item orders. Brands like Cambro and Vollrath build the standard here.
• Pizza bags with a heated insert if you deliver pizza at distance.
• Food transport carts if you load several orders at once or run any volume of catering drops. Catering work has its own gear requirements on top of this list, laid out in the catering equipment list for off-site work.
• Cold packs and insulated liners for the items that have to arrive cold next to items arriving hot. Separating the two is a packing habit, not an equipment purchase, but the liners make it possible.

If you use a delivery service rather than your own drivers, ask what the drivers carry before you buy. Metrobi, for example, works in the local delivery niche for food, floral, catering and wholesale businesses, with multi-stop route optimization and the option to work with the same drivers over time — and repeat drivers who know your packing routine are worth more than any single piece of insulation you can buy.

Order Routing Hardware: Printers, Screens and Tickets

Tickets are equipment too. A kitchen running dine-in alongside online and third-party delivery orders has four or five sources of tickets, and every one of them needs to reach the right station without a person reading a tablet aloud.

Two main options. Kitchen printers are cheap, durable and familiar; they typically cost under $500 a unit and print a physical ticket at each station. A kitchen display system puts tickets on screens, routes by station automatically, and gives you timing data, for a larger up-front spend.

Most independent kitchens start with printers, and plenty stay there. If you want the full comparison (impact versus thermal, how routing by station works, what it costs to run), it is covered in the dedicated guide to restaurant kitchen printers.

Smallwares, Warewashing and the Unglamorous List

Smallwares are the category everyone underestimates. A rough rule of thumb is to budget 10–15% of your equipment buildout for them, and delivery pushes the number toward the top of that range because you burn through portioning tools and containers faster.

The list that always gets forgotten:

• A warewashing setup that meets your local code: typically a three-compartment sink plus a dish machine, with a separate handwash sink.
• Prep tools and smallwares: knives, cutting boards, sheet pans, hotel pans, ladles, tongs, scales, squeeze bottles.
• Portion control tools. Delivery portions have to be consistent because customers photograph them.
• Storage containers and shelving, sized to the bulk quantities you buy.
• Labeling supplies for date marking and allergen notes.
• Cleaning chemicals, mats, first aid, and a fire extinguisher rated for your cooking.
• Front-of-house equipment: POS terminals, a pickup shelf or counter, and signage telling customers where to collect.

What a Restaurant Equipment Budget Looks Like in 2026

These are planning ranges from current startup-cost breakdowns, not quotes. Use them to sanity-check a bid, not to set one.

Sources: RestOps 2026 startup cost breakdown, Katalyst, TouchBistro.

The second-generation number is the one to pay attention to. Taking over a space that already has a hood, a walk-in and gas lines drops equipment from roughly a third of your startup cost to something closer to a sixth. That single decision outweighs every individual purchase on this list.

The Buying Order for Restaurant Equipment

Money runs out before the list does. Buy in this sequence:

1. Code-required infrastructure. Hood, fire suppression, warewashing, handwash sinks, grease interceptor. You cannot open without these and you cannot defer them.
2. Primary cooking equipment. The one or two pieces your menu is built on.
3. Cold storage. Walk-in or reach-ins, plus line refrigeration.
4. Holding and packing. A holding cabinet and a real packing counter. Cheap, and the first thing that improves off-premises quality.
5. Order routing. Printers at each station, or a KDS if the budget allows.
6. Transport. Insulated bags and carriers, in quantity.
7. Smallwares and storage. Budget generously; you’ll reorder within the month.
8. Everything else. Display cases, specialty equipment, pickup lockers, the second combi.

If an item doesn’t appear on that list and isn’t required by code, it can wait until you know your actual volume mix. Three months of real tickets will tell you whether you need a second fryer or a bigger holding cabinet, and the answer is often not the one you’d have guessed.

How to Buy It: New, Used, or in Bulk

Three sourcing routes, and most kitchens use all three.

New, through a dealer, for refrigeration, anything with electronics, and anything you want a warranty and a service relationship on.

Used, for gas cooking equipment, stainless tables, shelving and smallwares, the categories where there’s little to go wrong and the savings reach 30–60%. Which pieces are safe second-hand and how to inspect one before you pay is the subject of the pros and cons of used restaurant equipment.

In volume, for consumables: containers, bags, gloves, paper, cleaning chemicals. This is where off-premises kitchens spend quietly and continuously, and where order sizing against delivery minimums and storage space actually matters. The mechanics are in the guide to buying restaurant supplies in bulk.

Behind all three is the vendor relationship. A supplier who answers the phone, delivers on the day they said, and can get you a part in 48 hours is worth paying slightly more for, which is the case made in how to find the best restaurant supplier in your city.

Frequently Asked Questions

What equipment does a restaurant need to start doing delivery?

At minimum: a heated holding cabinet or equivalent, two to four feet of dedicated packing counter with container storage, insulated delivery bags in two sizes, a label printer, and ticket routing that gets online orders to the cookline without retyping. Everything else is refinement.

How much should I budget for restaurant equipment?

Plan on $30,000–$80,000 for kitchen and cooking equipment in a typical new restaurant, and expect equipment plus smallwares to take 25–35% of total startup cost in a scratch build. A second-generation space with the hood and walk-in already installed cuts that share to roughly 15–20%.

Is it cheaper to lease restaurant equipment?

Leasing lowers the up-front number and raises the total. It makes sense for a single expensive piece you’re unsure about, or when preserving cash matters more than total cost. For stainless tables and shelving, it rarely pays.

What’s the difference between restaurant equipment and restaurant supplies?

Equipment is the capital kit you buy once and depreciate: ovens, refrigeration, holding cabinets. Supplies are the consumables you reorder: containers, gloves, paper, chemicals. They come from different vendors, on different cycles, out of different budget lines.

Start With the Weakest Link, Not the Biggest Line Item

The temptation with an equipment list this long is to start at the top and spend until the money runs out. Resist it. After code compliance and your primary cooking equipment, the next dollar is almost always better spent on holding and packing than on a larger version of something you already have.

Run a week of tickets and watch where orders actually stall. If bags sit on the pass losing heat, you need holding. If drivers wait while someone hunts for a lid, you need a packing station. If tickets get missed, you need routing. The equipment that fixes your worst bottleneck is the equipment worth buying next, regardless of what it costs.