Find your place in the field of good food

Our goal is to connect good people with good food. We advertise sustainable food jobs and training opportunities to help jobseekers and employers find each other.

Roots to Work is a project of Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming.

Chef

Edinburgh Food Social
Edinburgh, Scotland

Posted: 17 Dec 2024

Deadline: 10 Jan 2025

Compensation: £18,024, 3 days per week. 1-year role

Paid Part-time

Job description

This is an exciting opportunity for a passionate and organised Chef to join our growing Social Enterprise and support our mission to transform our local food culture and people’s lives through food education and free meals and provide excellent catering to people using local produce. Our passion is for educating and equipping young people and communities, with the skills and knowledge to feed themselves well. Scotland is full of amazing produce and here at Edinburgh Food Social we want to make sure that not only everyone has access to it but knows what to do with it.

About you and the Chef role

This role will form an integral part of the roll-out of an ambitious programme to transform the food culture in Craigmillar while also supporting our catering chef. Our community food work is an intensive programme of food education, free community dinners, free recipe kits and ready-to-reheat meals, training for young people to become Chefs, pop-ups in our food truck, classes in local schools and trips to farms.

We are looking for a dedicated and excellent Chef to become part of our team and help us achieve our mission. It is integral that this person has very strong people skills and is able to work with people from all different backgrounds with no prejudice or judgment. As a Chef with EFS, you will help plan and deliver classes to a whole host of different individuals and organisations. The role will be flexible with doing community work and catering work - sometimes it will be making community meals to be boxed up and sometimes lunches or hot buffets for events. The split will be something like 2 days of community and 1 day of catering. You will need to be able to inspire and motivate the local community to get cooking and train people who leave school with no qualifications to work in the industry.

We’re only a small organisation and so the this role has to slot into the wider organisation and be able to be a strong team player as well as an independent worker. They will need to be responsible for maintaining and keeping the kitchen clean. The responsibilities, skills and experience listed below are intended to give you an idea of what we need for this role. If you don’t meet every requirement but feel you would be able to work with us to deliver the majority of them, we urge you to apply anyway. We are dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, and for us, the most important ‘experience’ is a passion for our mission.

Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Deliver in-person training sessions to individuals and groups of all ages and backgrounds
• Maintain, update and develop relevant training materials to keep our programme up to date and identify areas to develop new programmes that complement our organisational strategy
• Develop additional training resources, where necessary, to support the delivery of project objectives
• Cook for and at catering events - including being the only Chef at an event Gather feedback to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the training programme
• Maintain partner and community relationships to ensure smooth delivery of training programmes and events
• Create recipes and menus based on the ever-changing ingredients we have available to us Develop recipe kits Cook for community dinners and pop-up events
• Some flexibility with working times and days to work evenings and weekends for events.

Skills & experience

• Excellent verbal communication skills
• Experience working in a catering or kitchen environment
• Able to create user-friendly and engaging recipes
• Great people skills to build rapport with learners and strike a balance between being supportive and challenging
• Excellent presentation and facilitation skills to deliver engaging training sessions and experience in doing this
• Excellent scheduling and time management skills to manage workload
• Experience delivering training to a kitchen workforce or adult learners
• An understanding of hospitality, especially how to deliver quality food and service
• A background in training An understanding of economic or nutritional deprivation and the challenges these pose for people

Our team

You would be joining a dedicated, friendly, supportive team that work hard but believes in a healthy work/life balance. Any overtime hours will be replaced with TOIL or paid. Joining a small, collaborative team means you’ll be able to contribute to our projects. You’ll be part of the wider organisation's work and everyone works together to do what needs to be done to help the organisation succeed.  

Application information

We ask you to please send a cover letter explaining why you meet the criteria for the job and are passionate about the issue along with your CV to kirsty.haigh@edinburghfoodsocial.org

If you are shortlisted then we will ask you to come in for half a day. This will consist of a short chat/interview and you will be asked to do a short cookery class for our Head. This portion will last 2 hours. You will then cook (potentially with some of the team) so we can gain an understanding of your skills in the kitchen. This section will last 2 hours and you will be paid for this as we are putting you to work.

Please mention Roots to Work when applying for these jobs