Kitchen Manager
CurrentI was promoted to this role in March 2018. Since then I have managed a team of about 20 individuals working shifts around the clock. I ensure we all meet a very high standard of quality and consistency from day to day. I have developed an SOP for every kitchen position and reconfigured the distribution of work load among shifts. I added several responsibilities to my position's obligations including writing the kitchen schedules and managing labor hours. I configured our food costs and developed a system to track our waste. I maintain appropriate par levels and calculate how much product to cook in order to fulfill our pre-order commitments. I brought organization and cleanliness to our walk ins, dry storage, kitchen and smokehouse. I rewrote all of our recipes to a more standard format and developed production schedules which reduced downtime and cut 3 shifts a week. I created log books to record all of the data from butchers, cooks and cutters to allow for future comparisons and more involved communication between shifts. After changing some of the cooking strategies, we have decreased our loss on the cutting board by about 20%. I have hired several people, had 4 people quit after several years and had to fire one cook after a couple of months. We started making our own sausage in August of 2018 in order to utilize some of our waste. We are currently making 700-800 pounds a week. This was a great team effort and I learned a lot about the sausage making process. I am also responsible for ensuring our events go well. We do about a dozen big events every year and several smaller ones, most of them are just bbq, but some of them allow our team to get creative. We also host an event called Hot Luck every year where we are able to interact with great chefs from around the country which has been a great way to network and expand our understanding of the food we make.
