Student Kitchen Essentials: What You Need to Cook Well
Ask any second year what they wish they’d sorted before freshers week, and the kitchen comes up more often than not. Not the fun stuff, either, but the boring basics. A decent frying pan. A chopping board that isn’t warped. Cutlery that doesn’t disappear after the first house party. It’s the kind of thing nobody thinks about until they’re standing in an empty kitchen trying to fry an egg with a fork.
UNPACKED’s Student Kitchen Pack is built to solve exactly that problem, in one go, before you’ve even moved in.
Skip the Multi-Shop Scramble
Most students end up piecing a kitchen together bit by bit: a pan set from one place, plates from another, a knife block that gets added to the basket almost as an afterthought. It works, eventually, but it eats into a week that’s already packed with orientation sessions, society sign-ups, and trying to remember everyone’s name in your corridor.
Order the kitchen pack instead, and it turns up as one parcel, already sorted, waiting when you arrive. There’s no juggling five different delivery windows or realising three days in that nobody bought a colander. You open one box, and the kitchen is done.
What Comes in the Pack
The £139 kitchen essentials pack is built around what a shared student kitchen actually needs, not a random assortment of extras:
- 18-Piece Dining Set, comprising 2x large plates, 2x side plates, 2x bowls, 2x mugs, 2x glass tumblers, and 2x sets of 4-piece cutlery
- 3-Piece Induction-Compatible Pan Set consisting of a 24cm frying pan, 18cm saucepan, 16cm saucepan
- 1x Oven Tray/Roaster
- 5-Piece Utensil Set consisting of a slotted spoon, slotted turner, masher, solid spoon, and ladle
- Can opener and bottle opener
- Stainless steel colander
- 3-Piece Knife Set
- Stainless steel peeler
- Kitchen scissors
- 4-sided stainless-steel grater
- Two chopping boards, one plastic and one wooden
- 3x tea towels and a double oven glove
Everything on that list gets used weekly, if not daily. Nothing in there is filler.
Why It’s Cheaper Than Going It Alone
Add up a decent pan set, a full dinner service, a knife set, and all the smaller bits like a peeler and a grater, and the individual receipts creep past £139 fast, and that is before you’ve even paid for delivery on each one. Buying the pack sidesteps that entirely: one price, one order, and free standard postage on top for anything over £100.
There’s also less risk of overbuying. It’s easy to end up with three chopping boards and no can opener when you’re shopping piece by piece. The pack is put together with a shared kitchen in mind, so you get enough to cook properly without duplicates gathering dust in a cupboard.
Made for Actual Student Cooking
Every pan in the set works on induction hobs, which cover the vast majority of student kitchens. Plates, bowls, and cutlery are all dishwasher-safe, so clean-up after a flat dinner doesn’t become its own chore. None of it is designed to last one term and fall apart, as it’s built to see you through the full course, from beans on toast in week one to something more ambitious once you’ve found your feet.
Getting It to You
You pick the delivery date at checkout, and the pack arrives as a single tracked parcel on that day, whether you’d rather it land at your term-time address or your home before you travel. UNPACKED’s support team is on hand from 8am to 8pm every day if a delivery needs adjusting.
Get Things Sorted
Piecing a kitchen together yourself isn’t a bad option, and plenty of students still do it. But, weighed against the hours it takes and the odds of forgetting something, having it arrive ready-made is the easier route for most people starting.
Urban Student Life has partnered with UNPACKED because it takes one whole task off students’ plates during the most hectic week of the year. Get the kitchen sorted before you arrive, and spend that first week actually enjoying it.