Build standard
What we order to
Version 1.0
Issued 2026-09-05
This is the specification we buy against. A supplier who can meet it should not have to discover it over six weeks of email, and one who cannot should find out on page one rather than after a container has shipped.
It is written as a purchase specification, not as a claim. Where an instrument is named it is named because it governs the unit, and where a requirement falls on the manufacturer rather than on us, it says so.
Reviewed every six months, or within thirty days of a change to any instrument referenced below.
Normative references
The instruments this standard sits under
Named because they govern the unit. Naming an instrument is not a claim to hold an approval under it.
| Regulation (EU) 2018/858 | Approval of motor vehicles and their trailers. Category O covers our units. Whole-vehicle type approval, EU individual approval and national individual approval are the three routes. |
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| Regulation (EU) 19/2011 | Statutory plates and vehicle identification number. A structured VIN under a World Manufacturer Identifier allocated to the manufacturer. |
| Regulation (EU) 2019/2144 | General Safety Regulation. Applies to categories O1 to O4 in the German Article 45 procedure from 7 July 2026. |
| Regulation (EC) 852/2004 | Hygiene of foodstuffs. Governs the food operation, separately from the vehicle. Surfaces, water, waste, temperature control and HACCP. |
| Regulation (EU) 2016/426 | Gas appliances. A separate conformity route from both CE marking of other components and vehicle approval. |
| Road Vehicle Standards Act 2018 (AU) | Import approval before shipment and Register of Approved Vehicles entry before supply. Concessional entry is capped. |
| Road Vehicles (Approval) Regulations 2020 (GB) | Supplying a new category O trailer for road use without a certificate is an offence. Schedule 4, paragraph 1(1). |
| 49 CFR Parts 551, 565, 566, 591 (US) | Agent for service of process before importation, VIN and WMI, manufacturer identification, and importation declarations. |
The specification
Six sections, thirty-one requirements
Chassis and running gear
| Frame | Hot-dip galvanised steel, fully welded. Galvanising after fabrication, not before.Welding burns the zinc off, so a frame galvanised before it is welded corrodes first at every weld, which is where the stress is. |
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| Suspension | Rubber torsion or leaf, rated at or above the declared gross vehicle weight.An axle rated below the plated mass makes the plate a fiction. The operator loads to the plate, in good faith, and the axle is outside its rating on the first day. |
| Braking | Overrun braking with automatic reverse, on every axle above 750 kg gross.Without the automatic reverse the brakes bind when reversing. An operator who reverses onto a pitch every day disconnects it, and then has no brakes at all. |
| Coupling | Coupling head must carry its own approval, with a stabiliser fitted and the approval number stated on the technical file.Several markets check the coupling approval at registration. The number cannot be recovered later if the manufacturer never wrote it down, and the unit sits. |
| Lighting | Road lighting to the destination market, e-marked, on a 13-pin connector.An unmarked lamp fails at the roadside and at registration. A seven pin socket cannot carry the reversing and fog circuits that some markets require, and rewiring after delivery means opening the frame. |
| Mass declaration | Unladen mass weighed on the finished unit, not calculated. The ticket travels with the unit.A calculated unladen mass understates the fit out. The plated figure decides which licence may tow the unit, so an optimistic figure makes the buyer's licence wrong rather than ours. |
Body and structure
| Panel | Insulated sandwich panel, bonded, with no thermal bridge at the corner posts.A metal corner post carried through the insulation condenses on the inside face. The water runs down the lining into the floor junction, where it is found a year later as a soft floor. |
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| Interior lining | Food-grade, non-absorbent, wipe-clean, coved to the floor with no square internal corner.A square internal corner cannot be cleaned to the standard the hygiene regulation asks for. It is the first place an inspection looks and it cannot be corrected without stripping the lining. |
| Floor | Anti-slip, sealed and coved, falling to a drain.Water standing on a flat floor is the finding. A floor that cannot be washed down without soaking the wall junction is the cause, and both are decided by the fall and the cove. |
| Roof | One-piece or fully sealed, insulated, and able to take a person for service access.Extraction, gas flues and lights are serviced from above. A roof that will not take a person means every service visit deforms it, and the leak that follows is blamed on the seal. |
| Serving aperture | Gas-strut supported, lockable, sealed when closed.An unsealed hatch takes water in at motorway speed. A hatch without struts closes on whoever is under it. |
| Point loads | Any appliance over 150 kg sits on a frame designed for it, and the design is submitted before build.An appliance bolted to a floor that was not designed for it moves in transit. The damage shows up after delivery, when nobody can prove whether it was the build or the road. |
Electrical
| Design | Circuit schedule and schematic submitted for approval before wiring begins.A schematic drawn after the wiring describes what was built rather than what was required. The first person to find the difference between them is the inspector. |
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| Protection | RCD protection on every final circuit. Distribution rated at or above the declared connected load.A mobile unit is a wet installation on a temporary supply, run by people in contact with earthed metal. That is the case residual current protection exists for. |
| Inlet | Industrial connector matched to the declared supply tier, IP-rated.A connector that does not match the supply on the pitch means an adaptor, and an adaptor is where the earth is lost. |
| Bonding | Full equipotential bonding, with a test certificate covering continuity, insulation resistance and RCD operation.Bonding is invisible once the panels are closed. It is either certified at build or it is a claim, and a claim is worth nothing to the person who has to energise the unit. |
| Separation | Mains and extra-low-voltage circuits physically separated and separately identified.Mains and control wiring in shared trunking chafes on the road. When it does, mains voltage appears on a circuit that was designed for twelve volts. |
| Marking | Every circuit labelled at the distribution board, in the language of the destination market.An unlabelled board means the wrong circuit is isolated during a repair, by somebody who is about to put their hands in it. |
Water, waste and gas
| Potable water | Food-grade tank, pipework and fittings throughout, with a drain-down on every circuit.A food grade tank fed through pipe that is not food grade is not a potable system. A circuit with no drain down cannot be disinfected, and it splits over the first winter. |
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| Waste | Sealed tank of no less than the fresh capacity, with an external discharge point.A waste tank smaller than the fresh tank overflows before the fresh tank empties. It happens on the pitch, in service, and there is nowhere for it to go. |
| Hand wash | A dedicated hand-wash basin, separate from any food or utensil sink.Washing hands in the food or utensil sink is what an environmental health officer looks for. Whether it is possible to do anything else is decided at build rather than by a habit. |
| Gas installation | Regulated, in a vented locker with the bottle restrained, bulkhead-mounted, and pressure-tested with a certificate.LPG is heavier than air and collects at floor level, so an unvented locker stores it. The pressure test certificate is also what an event organiser and an insurer ask to see before the unit is allowed on. |
| Gas appliances | Certified for the destination market at the time of manufacture. CE marking alone does not satisfy this and is not accepted as evidence.Certification has to exist at the time of manufacture and cannot be added afterwards. In Australia it is an offence to sell an uncertified Type A appliance and CE marking is explicitly not sufficient, which makes an uncertified unit unsellable there rather than merely late. |
Ventilation, fire and safety
| Extraction | Sized to the installed hot line with a stated volumetric rate, with grease filtration and a make-up air path.Extraction with no make up air path starves the burners and pulls the door shut. Grease in an unfiltered duct is the thing that actually catches fire. |
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| Suppression | Automatic suppression over any fryer or solid-fuel appliance, commissioned with a certificate.A suppression system installed and not commissioned is not a system. The commissioning certificate is what the insurer and the site rely on, and it cannot be issued retrospectively. |
| Portable fire | Appropriate class extinguishers and a fire blanket, mounted and signed, at the exit.An extinguisher stored under a counter is not reachable in the situation it exists for. Mounted at the exit, in sight, is the difference between having one and having one. |
| Egress | An exit that is usable with the serving hatch closed.The hatch is closed when the unit is not trading, which is when a cooling fryer is at its most dangerous and the operator is inside cleaning. |
Identification and documentation
| VIN | 17-character VIN under a World Manufacturer Identifier allocated to the manufacturer. The allocating authority is named. A stamped plate without an allocation is not accepted.A VIN stamped without an allocated World Manufacturer Identifier is not traceable and registration is refused. Correcting it means restamping a finished chassis. |
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| Statutory plate | Fixed, legible, showing manufacturer, VIN, permissible masses and axle loads.It is the document the police, the weighbridge and the registration authority all read. Without it the masses are unproven, whatever the paperwork says. |
| Technical file | Drawings, circuit schedule, water and gas schematics, appliance certificates, mass ticket, and the test certificates named above.A registration authority, an insurer and a buyer's own inspector each ask for parts of it. It cannot be reconstructed once the unit has left the factory and the people who built it have moved on. |
| Language | Instructions and markings in the language of the destination market.A marking that the user cannot read is a marking that is not read, and the obligation to provide it falls on whoever placed the unit on the market. |
Change control
How this document moves
Versioning
Every issue of this standard carries a version and a date. A change that adds or tightens a requirement takes the next whole number. A correction that does not change what is built takes a point release.
An order is built to the version it names
The technical file for an order names the version of this standard in force on the day the specification was frozen. A later issue does not reach back into an order already in build, and we do not ask for a change without a variation in writing.
Notice
A whole-number issue is published thirty days before it applies to new orders, so a supplier can price it, argue with it, or decline it before it binds anything.
The reason a requirement exists is recorded
Where a requirement follows from an instrument, that instrument is named in the normative table. Where it follows from something we have been told by an approval authority or an inspector, it is dated and attributed in the correspondence behind the standard, and we will show that on request.
Deviation
When a clause cannot be met
Propose it before the build, not after
A requirement that cannot be met is raised in writing before material is cut, with the alternative proposed and the evidence behind it. That is a normal engineering conversation and it costs nobody anything.
An accepted deviation is written onto the technical file
If we accept it, the deviation, its scope and its evidence are recorded against that build and against that serial. It is then part of the specification and the inspector checks the deviation rather than the clause.
An undocumented deviation is a rejection
A substitution or a change found at inspection that was never proposed is a rejection, whether or not the substitute is as good. The requirement is the record, not only the part.
Some requirements cannot be deviated from
Anything that carries an approval, a certificate or a marking for the destination market. Those are not ours to waive and a concession from us would be worth nothing at the border.
Can you build to this?
If most of it reads like a normal week, we should talk.