Culinary Field Specialist

careers-ucfs; Pullman (WA); On-site; USD 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Upper Crust Food Service seeks a Culinary Field Specialist to lead real-time kitchen operations across our subregion. You’ll taste, coach, and troubleshoot with chefs, ensuring consistent quality and safety from house to house.

This hands-on role lives in the kitchens, not an office, and requires travel across the subregion. You’ll build leadership experience toward Area Manager while keeping schedules, vendors, and on-site partnerships running smoothly.

Qualifications

• Real time in a kitchen; line cook, sous chef, kitchen manager, chef experience.
• A palate you trust and an eye that catches what's off before someone tells you.
• Patience to teach and the backbone to hold a standard, sometimes in the same conversation.
• Enough organizational instinct to run a schedule and fix a broken sauce in the same afternoon.
• A level head when a kitchen needs help right now.
• Ability to talk technique with a chef at 6 AM and give a calm update at 10 AM.
• Willingness to be on the road within your subregion; kitchen-based role, not inbox.
• Interest in building a career in culinary field leadership.

Responsibilities

• Kitchen standards and chef coaching across subregion.
• Solving problems in the field with chefs; bringing fixes and context.
• Staffing and scheduling to ensure adequate hands each shift.
• Vendors and ingredients coordination for on-time deliveries and setup.
• Working with on-site partners and managing contractor relationships.
• Hands-on kitchen leadership to keep quality high across locations.

Skills

Kitchen experience

Line cook

Sous chef

Kitchen manager

Chef

Palate intuition

Organizational skills

Travel readiness

Job description

Proudly serving Sororities and Fraternities, Upper Crust Food Service is known for freshness, quality, variety, and excellent customer service. Upper Crust Food Service began with a vision to solve a problem that many Fraternity and Sorority houses face. That problem is a lack of consistency and professionalism in the kitchen. With a focus on great food and personal service, we’ve remained true to our roots. Today, the chefs of Upper Crust Food Service prepare tens of thousands of meals weekly for students across the country.

If you've ever walked into a kitchen and known within thirty seconds whether it was having a good day or a bad one, we want to talk to you.

Upper Crust puts chefs in houses, and we're only as good as the last meal that came out of one of our kitchens. The Culinary Field Specialist is the person who makes sure that meal is a good one, house after house, across a whole subregion. You've cooked. You've run a line, maybe run a kitchen. You know the difference between a chef having an off day and a kitchen that's actually in trouble, and you know how to tell them apart fast.

This job has you in the kitchens most of the week, not behind a desk. You're tasting food, watching prep, jumping on the line if someone's in the weeds, and talking a chef through a rough stretch like someone who's been there. There's real coordination work underneath all of that schedules, staffing, and vendors but it's there to make the cooking easier, not to replace it. If you want to run your own subregion as an Area Manager someday, this is how people earn that job here: kitchen by kitchen, not spreadsheet by spreadsheet.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Kitchen standards and chef coaching

• Get into the houses in your subregion regularly and taste the food, watch the line, see how prep is actually going, not just whether a checklist got signed.
• Talk to chefs like a chef would. Coach technique, menu execution, and consistency because you've earned the right to, not because it's your job title.
• When something's off on the food safety or quality side, catch it early and help fix it right there instead of writing it up for later.

Solving problems in the field

• Be the person a chef actually wants to call when a menu bombs, an ingredient falls through, or a kitchen is running thin and helps them work through it.
• When something bigger needs the Area Manager's attention, bring it to them with the context and a fix already in mind.
• Solve problems with your chefs, not around them.

Staffing and scheduling, in service of the kitchen

• Keep schedules across your houses covered so every kitchen has the hands it needs to cook well, every single shift.
• Be the first call when a shift falls apart whether a no-show, a call-out, an emergency and make sure a short-staffed day doesn't turn into a lower-quality meal.
• Keep a real bench of relief staff you can actually count on, not just a list.

Vendors and ingredients

• Stay on top of vendors so chefs are cooking with what they ordered, when they need it.
• When a new house comes online, get the kitchen itself ready. Equipment, setup, staffing all needed so it opens cooking at Upper Crust standard from day one.

Working with partners

• Be the day-to-day contact for on-site partners when something comes up.
• Handle the coordination-level stuff yourself; loop in the Area Manager for anything relationship- or contract-related.
• Show partners the same care in how you show up that they see on the plate.

WHAT YOU BRING

• Real time in a kitchen, a line cook, sous chef, kitchen manager, chef. Ideally with some experience leading others or working across more than one site.
• A palate you trust and an eye that catches what's off before someone has to tell you.
• Patience to teach and the backbone to hold a standard, sometimes in the same conversation.
• Enough organizational instinct to run a schedule and fix a broken sauce in the same afternoon.
• A level head when a kitchen needs help right now, not next week.
• The range to talk technique with a chef at 6 AM and give a partner a calm update at 10 AM.
• A willingness to be on the road within your subregion. This job lives in the kitchens, not in an inbox.
• A real interest in building a career in culinary field leadership, not just passing through.

SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

You'll know you're doing this job well when the food across your subregion is consistently good and the chefs running those kitchens trust you.

• The food holds steady, house after house, even on the hard weeks.
• Chefs call you before a small problem turns into a big one.
• Shifts stay covered without the quality taking a hit to make it happen.
• Your Area Manager gets to spend their time on partners and growth because the kitchens are in good hands.
• Partners notice, and say so.

THE PATH FORWARD

This is how we build Area Managers at Upper Crust. Every house you visit, every chef you coach, every problem you solve on the spot is building the judgment that job takes. This role goes somewhere and it starts with showing up in the kitchen.

Upper Crust Food Service provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.