Head Chef Production

About the role

This role sits at the heart of the Culinary Operations team, delivering consistently great-tasting, high-quality, nutritious meals to customers every day. It's an opportunity to lead, develop and build a kitchen team, shaping how the kitchen runs and the culture within it, with site and equipment upgrades planned.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the kitchen team day to day — setting the pace, the standards and the tone on the floor.
• Drive kitchen culture, food safety culture and operational efficiency across the brigade.
• Work closely with the Assembly team to deliver finished goods on time in full, ensuring components are cooked to standard, resourced appropriately, and ingredient specifications are followed.
• Lead, train and develop the brigade — building a strong, motivated team through a period of business change and growth, including upskilling existing team members and bringing new starters up to standard.
• Collaborate closely with the Head of Culinary and Culinary Specialist to preserve quality and consistency at scale.
• Maintain accurate production records in line with food safety and production guidelines.
• Take an active role in planned site and equipment upgrades — identifying improvements, trialling and building new processes and embedding them across the team.

About you

• Background in culinary, professional cookery or food production.
• Strong understanding of ingredients, food safety cooking methods, cooking equipment and product behaviour at scale.
• Comfortable working with staff of all backgrounds and skill levels, and able to get the best out of each of them.
• Effective communicator with the ability to train and guide.
• A natural improver — spots what could work better and follows through to make it happen.
• Able to keep motivation and standards high through busy or challenging periods.
• Highly organised, detail-oriented, and proactive.
• Experience in food manufacturing or high-volume production kitchen environments (preferred).
• Experience with rostering to a budget and monitoring labour (preferred).
• Knowledge of HACCP, food safety, and commercial cooking equipment (preferred).