For most culinary students, the idea of working in fast food isn’t one that inspires a lot of hope for the future. After all, you don’t have to have a degree in order to assemble hamburgers, and working in a fast food kitchen is one of the lowest-paying jobs you’ll find in the culinary world.
However, being a fast food chef isn’t all about going to work at the fryer for eight hours every day. It is possible to work in the fast food industry and put your culinary education to good use.
- Food Scientists: Every fast food company, from McDonald’s to Auntie Anne’s, has a team of chefs who work at the home office, developing new items for the menu and improving food quality. These new items can take years to perfect, and the process includes everything from doing market research and determining what sort of food is going to be the next big thing to coming up with ways to keep the food fresh and tasty on a mass-production scale.
- Teaching: The fast food industry has a fairly high turnover rate for employees, and it’s necessary to train new recruits almost continuously. While the actual task of cook training generally falls on another lower-level employee at the store, the techniques used are developed by a team of experts. It requires quite a bit of culinary knowledge to come up with a basic skills training process that is both safe and effective.
- Safety and Sanitation: All fast food restaurants are held to high standards of sanitation and food safety. As is the case with cook training, the techniques for food safety are developed at the national level and passed down to individual chain restaurants. Developing and monitoring safety and sanitation techniques often falls to higher-level specialists with culinary training.
Working in the executive or development offices of a fast food restaurant can be a very rewarding career. Not only do the hours tend to fall in the 9-to-5 range and offer a more relaxed workplace, but the pay can reach upwards of $80,000 per year. If you’re looking for great job stability that still taps into your culinary training, fast food can actually be a wise career move.
Of course when you don’t have time to cook, fast food would always be the best option.