Bulk Towels for Restaurants: A Buyer's Guide
By The Velocity Wear Team
Restaurant towels are quoted per job, with a minimum of 50 pieces per design and a production window of 10 to 15 working days from artwork approval. The specification splits by where the towel works. Back of house needs absorbency and a fast dry. Front of house needs a finish a guest will touch. One towel rarely does both jobs well.
What does a restaurant use branded towels for?
Four uses, in descending order of quantity. Kitchen and service cloths, which are consumed rather than kept. Bar towels for glassware and spills. Guest hand towels in washrooms, where a branded finish reads as attention to detail. And gift or retail towels, which only make sense for a restaurant with a merchandise following.
Only the last two need to look good. The first two need to work, and branding them is mainly about stopping them walking off the premises and about presentation when a service cloth is visible over an arm. Our towels page lists the sizes that suit each of those roles.
Which weight stands up to a service wash?
Gym weight is the workhorse here. It is the lightest of the three weights we supply, absorbs well relative to its mass and dries between services, which matters when a kitchen turns its cloths over twice a day. Spa weight suits washrooms and anywhere a guest picks the towel up. Hotel weight is heavier still and is worth the money only where the towel is on display.
Bear in mind that a service wash is hotter and more aggressive than a domestic one. Anything ordered for back of house should be specified assuming a commercial laundry cycle and a bleach-based stain regime. If greying and stiffening are already a problem with your current stock, our post on why branded towels go hard and grey explains what causes it.
How do you stop bleach and heat wrecking the branding?
Woven branding is built into the towel during manufacture, so it does not sit on the surface and cannot be scrubbed off it. In a kitchen environment that is the durable option. Printed branding carries fine detail and full colour, which a woven border cannot, and is the right pick for a guest towel or a retail item that sees a gentler life.
A practical middle route: woven for everything behind the pass, printed for everything a customer sees. That is two designs and two lots of 50, but the back-of-house quantity is usually high enough that it would have been a separate order anyway. The wider hospitality picture is on our restaurants and hospitality page.
What does a restaurant towel order involve?
Pricing is per job, because weight, size, colour count and branding method all move it. The volume discount reaches up to 35% as quantity rises from the 50-piece price, with tiers at 50 to 99, 100 to 249, 250 to 499, 500 to 999 and 1,000 plus. A group with several sites usually clears a higher tier by ordering centrally and splitting the delivery.
A sample costs £150 and is credited against the bulk order. For back-of-house stock, put the sample through your actual laundry contractor before signing off, because that cycle is what the towel has to survive. We deliver across the UK, USA and Europe and invoice in seven currencies.
Rotation is worth a system, however small the site. Bulk stock should go into service oldest first, which sounds obvious and almost never happens on its own, because staff take from the top of the pile. Keeping new stock boxed until the current batch is genuinely finished stops a kitchen running a mixture of two-year-old cloths and fresh ones, and it makes the next order easy to size, because you can say exactly how long the last delivery lasted instead of estimating it.
