Corporate Chef

Want a career with purpose? Join a team driven by purpose, creating better food, value, and relationships across an entire global ecosystem.

About Custom Culinary®

From our humble beginnings over 70 years ago, Custom Culinary® has focused on a singular mission: to provide foodservice and food processing professionals with true, real, and authentic flavor solutions. This passion could not be more relevant today. Virtually everyone has become a foodie, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

At Custom Culinary®, staying true to the authenticity of flavor and the integrity of ingredients is in our DNA. We are a culinary-centric organization on a mission to help you create offerings that stand out and meet the exacting standards of today’s guests. We enthusiastically embrace the importance of global and regional influences, local sourcing, and cleaner ingredient statements.

We are unwavering in our commitment to delivering incredible taste, texture, and other sensory qualities in our bases, sauces, gravies, and flavoring systems. We aspire to help you take your offerings to remarkable new heights. And above all, we believe in being true to the food.

Purpose of the Position

The purpose of the Corporate Chef, South, is to provide support and expertise to Culinary Leadership, Sales, and Marketing in the development of differentiating food products for national, regional, industrial, and field accounts. Additionally, this position will support budgeted annual sales goals in accordance with our Triple Bottom Line (People, Planet, Performance) while also encompassing the spirit of a corporate mission: to “be true to the food” and “nourishing the world.”

 Major Duties & Responsibilities

• Operating Budget: Required to support the Culinary Department as a whole in achieving targeted US Sales, GM, and OI targets set on an annual basis.
• Expense Budget: Responsible for adherence to personal travel and meal budget at the discretion and approval of supervisor. This position does not have an entertainment budget.
• Provides Culinary support, technical and tactical expertise to the Custom Culinary Sales Team primarily in Texas and the West Region. This chef will have the unique opportunity to work with our Custom Culinary Team of talented and experienced chefs, our Global Team of Griffith Foods Chefs, and will have many opportunities for growth within the larger organization.
• Responsible for being the regional expert for our Custom Culinary product portfolio. This chef would have the unique opportunity to create custom product applications for our diverse high quality, culinary forward RTU products. This chef would have the ability and passion for food required to create appropriate menu/industry concepts and recipes for all channels of Sales, including working hip-to-hip with our customer network of chefs creating unique, one-of-a-kind proprietary products.
• Responsible for working closely with the Commercial team to integrate the necessary data insights or other guidelines that inform recipe creation with the goal of leading a “custom” strategy with our Custom Culinary customers in the region and be able to support tactical requests such as recipe formulation, operational tool development, culinary advice to our customers.
• The position would require travel up to 20% outside of this region for event/culinary activity support. Total travel will be approximately 60% of this position’s schedule. 
• Responsible for the execution of a variety of culinary special projects at the request by and at the discretion of the head of the Culinary Department. This may include interesting team activities such as creating and executing a menu for our Global Team meetings at the corporate office in Lombard, Illinois or creating a unique recipe for a food show with up to 600 attendees. These special activities would give this chef unique exposure to our Custom Culinary & Griffith Global executives as well as top industry leaders. 
• This role would include lending physical culinary support to our Culinary Team members for larger Trade shows and industry events. This gives this role the unique exposure to high-level Chefs in the industry and an opportunity to learn from a diverse team of highly skilled and certified Chefs
• Responsible for independent scheduling and managing daily activities in coordination with the Sales team-members being supported for projects assigned.
• Responsible for leading the training of culinary acumen as it relates to Custom Culinary product use and application for our customers. Specifically, this chef will support sales by training these individuals and the region’s broker network on an ongoing basis to increase and leverage the culinary acumen of the company as a whole.
• This position may require an occasional weekend for Trade Shows and other industry events. Approximately 2-4 times per year.
• This position will support sales with technical culinary acumen as the “chef to chef” relationship to the region’s customers. This may include managing and organizing multiple on-site presentations/cuttings, etc. to meet proprietary product targets.
• This position will support the administration of our recipe database and Teams Culinary sites as needed, no more than 10% of this position’s activities.

Working Relationships:

Internal:

• Reports to the head of the Culinary Department.
• The individual will have no direct reports.
• Works daily as directed with tactical guidance from the Corporate Executive Chef, West Coast.

External:

• Must maintain a strong effective and professional working relationship with all customer culinarians.

Requirements:

• Must live/be based in Texas or in proximity
• Must live in proximity to a major airport
• Must be highly proficient with the use of Microsoft Office computer and communication technologies and support the team as needed. This position will require acumen with Outlook, Notes, Teams, Excel, Word and various other Corporate based software programs required for HR/Expense reporting/People Development/Training functions.
• This Chef would have a “growth mindset”, would wish to grow professionally. This chef would be able to represent a culture of empathetic communications, active listening, honesty and and the spirit of openness and positivity when being coached or coaching others.
• Must be strong in ability to develop creative, channel-focused, on- trend culinary ideation and must have exemplary presentation and communication skills.
• Must possess strong organizational skills, be able to collaborate with the larger Commercial team-members.
• Is required to actively participate in the coordination, and execution of the Culinary Teams plans and vision associated with all company-specific goals, initiatives, and activities.
• Must demonstrate and understand the ability to efficiently work within identified financial parameters, have an understanding of basic P&L principles with the goal of properly supporting the regional sales team’s fiscal goals.

Education and/or Experience                                                                    

• Must have a minimum of an AOS in Culinary Arts or equivalent.
• Must earn and maintain professional certification with a leading culinary organization within the first 18 months of employment if not already achieved. I.E. American Culinary Federation or the Research Chefs Organization.
• Must have a minimum of 8 years of professional experience in one of the following positions: a corporate or regional chef in an operator setting; a hotel sous chef (or higher) for a boutique or upscale hotel company with experience in fine dining, catering, banquet operations; an R&D chef for a manufacturer of RTU products; a consultant chef for an agency specializing in National Chain Account, Industrial R&D or Hotel Chef operator sales.
• Must demonstrate knowledge of basic and advanced culinary techniques with the ability to creatively support and translate written concepts into live taste samples       
• Must have a strong command of soft skills such as TEAMWORK, listening, effective communication, prioritizing, organizing, problem-solving, dependability, adaptability, flexibility, self-motivation, responsibility, business etiquette, integrity, open-mindedness, creativity. critical thinking and time management.

Physical Requirements

• Must have the ability to work effectively across multi-functional lines with a strict focus on the effect and purpose of departmental initiatives and goals relative to the support of the company overall.
• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand for long periods of commercial kitchen activity and must be physically able to work in a classic kitchen setting. 
• This individual must be a bold, independent chef who is comfortable working in a kitchen autonomously with unfamiliar equipment and unfamiliar kitchen settings. 
• This individual must be physically able to set up for and execute busy, multi-day trade events.

EOE – Vet/Disability EEO Notice of Rights