What does a catering manager do?
You feed six hundred people in forty minutes, on a budget, and you are the person who has to know exactly what is in every dish.
Also called: contract catering manager, school catering manager, food service manager.
A day looks like
- 1You are in before six because bread and deliveries arrive before anybody else does.
- 2You check the allergen matrix against what the kitchen has actually made, not what the menu says.
- 3Service is forty minutes long and everything that goes wrong, goes wrong inside it.
- 4You count what came back uneaten, because that is the only honest measure of whether the menu works.
Hardest part
One mistake in the allergen information is not a complaint, it is a child in an ambulance. The paperwork that looks like bureaucracy is the actual safety system.
Best part
A menu the children actually eat, on the budget you were given, with almost nothing scraped into the bin.
How you actually become a catering manager
- At schoolA kitchen or a service counter. Most catering managers cooked first.
- TrainingFood safety level 3 or 4, allergen training, and usually supervisory qualifications on the job.
- How longThree to five years from the kitchen floor to running a unit.
- Your first jobCatering assistant or commis chef in a school, hospital or contract site.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is allergen information such a big part of this job?
- Because it is the part that kills people. Catering managers are legally responsible for knowing and declaring the allergens in everything served, and in schools they are serving children who cannot always advocate for themselves.
- Is it the same as being a chef?
- There is overlap, but a catering manager's job is the whole operation — costing menus, ordering, staffing, food safety law and compliance. Many are trained chefs who moved into running the unit.
- Why count what gets thrown away?
- Because it is the only honest measure. A menu that looks good on paper and comes back uneaten has failed, and waste is usually the largest controllable cost in the budget.
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