Chef and Food Champion at REFUSE CIC

Contract Type: Permanent

Role Type: Employment

Hours: Full or Part time

Application deadline: Tuesday, July 29, 2025 - 22:00

Based: Durham

Salary: £27,788 Pro Rata

Salary Type: Fixed Salary

Location: County Durham

Role description: Manager

If you’re a dedicated, talented chef passionate about feeding the future and joining a team that is challenging the way we value food, thisisthe role for you. Kinder hours and much more flexibility than most hospitality jobs, a supportive, inclusive team, and the opportunity for maximum creativity in the kitchen and beyond.

We’re looking for a full-time creative chef who will:

• Lead on Refuse’s mission to create fabulous, healthy and creative meals using food we’ve collected from supermarkets that would have otherwise gone to waste, using your skills to elevate and celebrate these rescued ingredients.
• Oversee the food being collected by our drivers and warehouse teams to ensure that we’re making the best use of the food coming in, working with our volunteers to preserve and direct it toward our different projects.
• Learn from our able daytime kitchen volunteer chefs, supporting them to serve between 80 and 100 daily covers in the cafe.
• Help design recipes and create menus from whatever food is available, work out ways to use up gluts and get round shortages, make things efficient and easy for our teams to serve consistent delicious and nutritious food.
• Oversee the kitchen on our restaurant nights, occasionally as head chef or working with other guest chefs to create one-off menus and support them to deliver to paying customers.
• Teach culinary skills and creativity to new volunteers, volunteers with additional support needs, or cooking courses for the public.
• Develop our offer for catered events, festivals, meals and workshops which will generate income and engage the public in the problem of food waste by showing them the value of food, what can be made with food wrongly labelled as worthless.
• Use your excellent cooking skills to help spread our message about the climate impact of food waste.
• Manage our Training Kitchen - manage a schedule of use by different groups to generate income from hire or through using it for catering prep and workshops.

if you are considering applying why not pick up the phone to have a chat with us about it, or email orcall to arrange a time to visit: we’d be happy to show you round REfUSE cafe and warehouse.

For a full job description and application details please visit our website: https://refusedurham.org.uk/work-with-us/