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.

Executive Chef

Little Origins Ltd
Hybrid: home-working & company kitchen in Frome, Somerset.

Posted: 25 Sep 2024

Deadline: 8 Nov 2024

Compensation: Competitive - TBD based on experience and working arrangement

Paid Part-time Fixed term / contract

Job description

Are you passionate about authentic and wholesome food and you’re looking to play a part in changing the food industry? Join us if you’re looking for a creative and strategic role designing food products and influencing a food start-up's strategy early on. We are on a mission to help families eat delicious, healthy, nutritious and sustainable food - setting an example across the industry.

Highlights:

• Innovative start-up with a creative, visionary team of foodies
• Working directly with founder to shape the business and strategy
• Freelance contract – flexible work arrangements (part-time or full-time available)
• Varied food experience (multiple cuisine types, hand-making everything)
• Location: Somerset (near Frome BA11). Open to Bristol/London based with travel

The Company

Join Little Origins, an innovative start-up at the forefront of changing food systems. We are a children and family food company that wants to set an industry-wide example on how to create nutritious, safe and sustainable food from farm to fork. We are passionate about all aspects of food: knowing our farmers and the land where our food has grown, making all of our food from scratch (e.g. home-making our plant based milk) and having a close relationship with the families who love our food.

We are a Direct 2 Consumer food subscription brand, making meals for families to enjoy conveniently at home - so people can rediscover the joy of eating a shared meal as a family of delicious and nutritious food, whilst having more time for themselves and with their children. The first 1000 days of a child’s life is key in influencing their lifelong health and eating habits. We want to support people to eat authentic meals free of ultra-processed food, made from organic ingredients and designed with the expertise of nutritionists and high-end chefs.

Join an entrepreneurial and fast-paced team at the beginning of our journey with the opportunity to influence and shape the direction of the Brand. We have won a £0.5m grant through Innovate UK to research and test products with customers before launching - giving us the opportunity to question and reinvent delicious, nutritious and sustainable food products. We are working with some of the leading food scientists and retailers in the country, including Campden BRI, the National Centre for Food Manufacturing and industry leaders with opportunities to develop partnerships with renowned chefs.

As part of this phase, we will be:

• Testing food recipes directly with customers and receiving feedback
• Experimenting with 40-50 different recipes and products
• Creatively exploring food that both children (6m - 3 years) and adults love (meals, finger foods, superfood snacks and breakfasts, pasta sauces, meals, broth, etc) with some dietary constraints that infants have (e.g. no salt)
• Placing nutrition at its heart - making food as fresh as possible (e.g. grinding our own flour) and working with regenerative agriculture and organic farmers.
• Making use of nutrition research findings and applying it to our cooking methodologies

The Job

• 3-5 days a week (a portion of strategy & planning, the rest experimenting in the kitchen)
• Designing and experimenting with 40-50 recipes ready for customer testing
• Discussing meals based on nutrition, different cultural traditions, “slow food” and children eating habits
• Producing test batches of 10-20 portions of food for home delivery for user trials to receive feedback
• Managing Kitchen Food Safety SOP’s, opening and closing kitchen
• Example tasks:
  • (1) shortlist 40-50 recipes aligned with Little Origin’s product strategy to experiment with, drawing on food trends, leading chefs and the nutritional and format constraints of children’s diets.
  • (2) make a tasty / high-end nutritious fish croquette (with no salt and no fishy taste), that kids can hold and is crunchy but soft enough to chew easily, that adults will enjoy as well. Take inspiration from other cultures (e.g. Portuguese bacalhau croquette)  

The Candidate

Essential

• Qualified chef – restaurant or manufacturing experience with a passion for food and inherent interest in the food industry: from food’s taste and flavour and the immense diversity of cooking styles, to how food is grown and its cultural importance
• Can work independently with an a curious mindset, happy to work in an unstructured and changing environment with a small founding team
• A chef who is excited to creatively design recipes, experimenting with food formats to improve flavour, texture, visual appearance of food and draw on wide variety of resources for inspiration
• Strong interest in nutrition and in tweaking recipes to increase nutritional content and wellbeing, in particular plant-based and vegan food
• Ability and Interest and to cook from many different cultural heritages (mediterranean, asian, etc) and draw from different practices (fermentation, 
• Has experience with children (through family) or cooking for children
• Ability to manage food safety requirements of all practices pertaining to food preparation and production (Minimum Level 3 Food Safety)
• Ability to work over email and basic tasks with Microsoft Word, Excel
• Full Driving Licence

Desirable

• Passionate about influencing people’s relationship with food by returning to authentic and clean cooking, eliminating the use of ultra-processed foods where possible
• Has the ability to translate innovative food trends into interesting products
• Experience in product development, understanding how food production can be scaled to larger volumes, including of making food for freezing/defrosting
• Ability to plan meals, forecasting quantity of ingredients needed, meal profitability
• If you’d like to be with us for our scale-up phase: ability to support recruitment, managing staff and building a kitchen team and operations
• Supports the customer pipeline through inspirational and innovative product and process ideation. Has the ability to translate food trends into relevant and commercially viable product Development  

The Benefits

• Competitive day-rate salary as a freelancer
• Flexible work schedule
• Opportunity to work with leading food innovators across the UK
• Opportunity to learn deep sustainability experience, from agriculture to production to packaging, including research and building relationships with cutting-edge organisations across the country
• Opportunity for strategic leadership and future growth of a team
• Versatile work experience

Application information

Please submit your responses to the following application and upload your CV. See link here.

We look forward to getting to know you.

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