Production Kitchen Manager (CPU)

Job Description

Role: Production Kitchen Manager

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Salary £45,000

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Location: Uxbridge

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About Dish’d

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Dish’d is the UK’s fastest-growing franchisor of virtual food brands. We partner with food operators, helping them maximise their kitchen capacity by launching and scaling delivery-only virtual brands across key platforms.

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About The Role

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The Production Kitchen Manager is responsible for ensuring Dish’d’s central production kitchen consistently delivers every product safely, efficiently and to specification.

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Reporting to the Head of Food, this role turns product development into production reality — taking recipes and concepts through recipe cards, batch sheets, training materials, pilot runs and full-scale production.

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This is a highly hands-on role, with an approximate 80:20 split between practical kitchen operations and management. You will be actively involved in production while also leading the day-to-day running of the Central Production Unit (CPU), managing the kitchen team and ensuring new products are successfully embedded into production.

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You will be responsible for maintaining high standards across product quality, food safety, consistency, cost control and operational efficiency. This role will suit someone who is practical, organised and process-driven, with a strong focus on getting things right every time.

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What You’ll Do

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CPU Operations Management

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• Lead day-to-day operations of the production kitchen, ensuring safe, efficient and consistent output.

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• Manage production schedules, staffing, batching, yields and throughput.

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• Ensure adherence to recipes, SOPs, allergens, HACCP and compliance standards.

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• Implement and maintain inventory controls, stock rotation and raw material checks.

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• Troubleshoot operational issues and escalate risks early

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Turning Development Into Production

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• Convert new product development outputs into full production documentation:

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• Recipe cards

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• Batch sheets

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• Costed ingredient lists

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• How-to videos

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• Step-by-step process guides

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• Run pilot batches for all new items and provide structured feedback to the Head of Food.

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• Flag scaling issues early and recommend adjustments for efficiency and consistency.

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Recipe Accuracy, Documentation & Training

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• Maintain a master database of all CPU recipes, specs, allergens and yields.

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• Ensure all documentation is exact, version-controlled and communicated to Operations, Onboarding and partner sites.

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• Train CPU team members on new products, changes to processes and quality expectations.

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• Record training videos and visual SOPs for rollout.

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Quality, Standards & Compliance

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• Conduct daily quality checks and enforce strict compliance with CCPs, food safety and hygiene.

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• Monitor yields, waste, and batch consistency — escalating variances.

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• Work with the Head of Food to introduce structure, repeatability and improvements.

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• Maintain kitchen audits, cleaning rotas, equipment logs and compliance paperwork.

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Cross-Functional Collaboration

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• Work closely with:

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• Head of Food – to ensure products are commercially viable and scalable.

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• Procurement – for ingredient quality, ordering accuracy and supplier issues.

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• Data Team – to provide production insights (waste, yields, batch errors).

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• Support with product launches through production readiness, pilots and operator documentation

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Continuous Improvement & Cost Efficiency

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• Identify opportunities to centralise more components to improve consistency and reduce operator effort.

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• Recommend equipment, process flow or layout improvements.

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• Drive cost reduction through standardisation, portioning accuracy and waste reduction.

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• Support implementation of new systems to streamline production planning and reporting.

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What You’ll Bring

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• 2–4 years’ experience in a production kitchen, CPU, food manufacturing or batch-cooking environment.

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• Strong understanding of food safety, HACCP, allergens and compliance. SALSA certification a bonus.

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• Ability to translate recipes into production-ready formats at scale.

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• Highly organised and methodical with exceptional attention to detail.

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• Comfortable creating visual training materials and recipe/process videos.

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• Experience training kitchen teams and enforcing standards.

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• Good communication skills across cross-functional teams.

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• Problem-solver with a continuous improvement mindset.

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• Ability to work at pace and manage multiple concurrent products.

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You’ll join a collaborative, forward-thinking team where ideas are valued, initiative is rewarded, and your impact is visible.

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