Walk into most equipment showrooms and the conversation starts in the same place: how many trays? It sounds like the decision itself, but it is really just shorthand for one. A tray count tells you what an oven can hold in a perfect world where every tray is full and every dish fits neatly inside it. It says nothing about whether your menu will fill those trays on a quiet Tuesday, or whether the oven will keep up on a Saturday night.
The more useful starting point is the menu itself — which dishes pass through the oven, in what volumes, and in what shape. Work backwards from there and you land on a size that carries the load without swallowing bench space, power capacity and money you would rather spend elsewhere in the fit-out.
Why Tray Count Alone Misreads the Menu
Capacity is what a specification sheet promises. Throughput is what your service actually gets out of the machine. A ten-tray oven turning over small pastries at high heat will push far more covers through in an hour than the same oven loaded with deep gastronorm pans of braised shoulder. The tray count has not changed — the menu has. Operators who buy purely on tray count tend to discover the mismatch in their first busy week, when the oven is either running half empty or stacked to the runners and still falling behind.
Pan format is the next piece of the puzzle. The range covers both GN 1/1 and GN 2/1 formats, and that difference matters more than many buyers expect. GN 1/1 suits the standard trays that most cafés, pubs and smaller restaurants already own and stack, and it keeps the oven cabinet narrower. GN 2/1 takes wider trays, full-sheet bakery work and bigger roast pans, but it demands a larger footprint, a different loading routine and more room around the machine. If half your menu is plated components in 1/1 pans, a wide-format oven can sit mostly empty for much of the day.
Then there is height. Tray spacing decides whether a whole chicken, a tall sourdough loaf or a deep roasting dish actually slides in without fouling the rack above. Two ovens with identical tray counts can behave completely differently once you load them with the things you cook every single day. It is worth taking your tallest, deepest and widest pans to the showroom floor rather than trusting a number printed on a brochure.
Cooking mode adds another layer again. A menu heavy on steam — proofing, blanching, reheating vegetables — behaves quite differently to one built on dry heat and combination roasting. The size that suits a bakery’s overnight bake schedule is rarely the size that suits a hotel’s banqueting line, even when both list the same tray capacity on paper.
Turning Your Menu Into a Real Tray Number
Start with a list, not a spec sheet. Write down the fifteen or twenty items that genuinely go through the combi oven in a normal week. For each one, note the pan it travels in, how many pans make up a batch, and how many batches you run at peak. That simple exercise converts a menu into a tray band far more reliably than guessing at future growth.
Then apply the worst-case test. Not your average Wednesday — your biggest lunch service, your busiest Friday, your event weekends. If the oven cannot take the peak, it is the wrong size no matter how tidy the shoulder-season numbers look. Equally, sizing for a peak that happens four times a year is expensive dead weight. A second loading session, or shifting one dish to a different cooking method, can cost far less than a permanently half-used twenty-tray machine.
Once you have a rough band, it pays to compare combi oven sizes and features across the brands in the range rather than settling on the first model that matches your number. The current catalogue count sits at 164 combi ovens and can change as models come and go, with brands including Convotherm, Rational, Retigo, Fagor, Unox and Invoq alongside Turbofan, Tecnodom, Benchstar and Atosa. Options stretch from compact countertop units such as the Invoq 6-1/1 GN and 10-1/1 GN Slim Hoodini models, through mid-size Unox Cheftop Mind.Maps ZERO and PLUS units in five-, six-, seven-, ten- and twenty-tray configurations, to large Fagor iKore Concept models listed up to forty trays.
Countertop versus trolley-loading is a menu question as much as a space question. Compact countertop ovens suit sites where the machine sits on a bench in a tight back-of-house and staff load tray by tray between other jobs. Trolley-loading ovens suit volume kitchens and event catering, where racks are loaded away from the heat and wheeled straight in. If you are pushing out two hundred covers of the same dish three times a week, trolley loading changes your labour far more than it changes the cook.
The Fit and Services Side of the Size Decision
The last filter is the room the oven will actually live in. Check external dimensions, door swing and the clearance you need to pull a rack or a hot tray out safely — not just the floor space the cabinet occupies. A model that fits the plan on paper can still fail on the day if the door will not open fully against a wall, a pass or a neighbouring fridge.
Services decide as much as measurements do. Confirm the selected model’s electrical or gas supply, water treatment, drainage and ventilation requirements before ordering. These details vary between models, and they are much easier to plan around than to retrofit into a working kitchen. Water treatment in particular is an ongoing cost of ownership on steam-capable machines, and ventilation requirements may shape the rangehood design above the oven, so it is worth raising them early with whoever is coordinating the fit-out.
There is a commercial side to sizing too. Atlantic Equipment has supplied and supported kitchens across New South Wales since 2002 from its Granville warehouse and showroom, stocking 140+ Australian and international brands across cooking, refrigeration, dishwashing and specialty equipment, with advice, delivery, installation and after-sales support as part of the offer. For operators who want to trial a size before committing, the company is an authorised dealer for SilverChef Rent-Try-Buy, which is built around renting equipment with low weekly payments and the option to upgrade or purchase after twelve months.
Finally, leave a little room for the menu to move. Most operators add a dish, a daypart or a second site within a few years, and a combi oven that needs replacing the moment the menu shifts was never really sized properly in the first place. Bring your pans, your peak batch counts and your busiest service to the Granville showroom — open Monday to Friday 9:00am–5:00pm and Saturday 10:00am–2:00pm — and the size question turns into a conversation about cooking instead of a number on a cover.
Born in the coastal city of Mombasa, Kenya, and now based out of Lisbon, Portugal, Aria Noorani is a globe-trotting wordsmith with a degree in Cultural Anthropology and a passion for turning complex ideas into compelling stories. Over the past decade she has reported on blockchain breakthroughs in Singapore, profiled zero-waste chefs in Berlin, live-blogged esports finals in Seoul, and reviewed hidden hiking trails across South America. When she’s not writing, you’ll find her roasting single-origin coffee, sketching street architecture, or learning the next language on her list (seven so far). Aria believes that curiosity is borderless—so every topic, from quantum computing to Zen gardening, deserves an engaging narrative that sparks readers’ imagination.