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Reporting to the General Manager of the unit, the Executive Chef, Operations is responsible for daily monitoring of the preparation of the pre-designed meals for multiple customer accounts with culinary expertise through the management of all Chefs, Sous Chefs and Cooks at the unit, and promoting and providing quality food services to airline clients.
Executive Chef - Airline Catering
Salary Range: 115-130K
Location: 30 Inip Dr, Inwood NY 11096
Benefits

• Paid time off
• 401k, with company match
• Company sponsored life insurance
• Medical, dental, vision plans
• Voluntary short-term/long-term disability insurance
• Voluntary life, accident, and hospital plans
• Employee Assistance Program
• Employee Discounts
• Free hot healthy meals for unit operations roles

The Executive Chef is the senior culinary and production leader responsible for overseeing a high-volume, complex airline catering operation functioning as an industrial-scale food manufacturing production department. This role ensures the safe, compliant, efficient, and cost-effective production of high-quality meals across multiple airline customers, while leading teams, enforcing strict process controls, and driving continuous improvement through data, standardization, and advanced production techniques.
The Executive Chef operates at the intersection of culinary excellence, industrial engineering, food safety, and operational leadership, ensuring all outputs meet regulatory requirements, airline specifications, and internal "gold standard" quality benchmarks.
Key Responsibilities
1. Safety, Sanitation & Compliance
The Executive Chef serves as the ultimate champion of a zero-compromise culture around food safety, employee safety, and sanitation. This role requires unwavering commitment to ensuring that every aspect of the operation consistently meets or exceeds regulatory and industry standards, including Health Department requirements, USDA and FDA regulations, as well as HACCP, GMP, and stringent airline-specific protocols.
Beyond compliance, the Executive Chef partners with the QA Support teams in the design, execution, and continuous improvement of robust sanitation programs, ensuring that cleaning schedules, validation processes, and verification mechanisms are rigorously followed. A strong focus is placed on allergen management and the prevention of cross-contamination, safeguarding both product integrity and consumer well-being.
Through proactive audits, inspections, and disciplined follow-up on corrective actions, the Executive Chef ensures full traceability and control throughout the production lifecycle, embedding food safety and operational discipline into the DNA of the kitchen organization.
2. Production Leadership
In this role, the Executive Chef operates as the senior production leader of a high-volume, industrialized food manufacturing environment. They are responsible for orchestrating complex, multi-line, multi-shift operations, ensuring that production flows seamlessly across kitchens and assembly lines.
Success in this position requires absolute discipline in execution-ensuring that production schedules, batch sheets, and product specifications are followed with precision. The Executive Chef establishes and reinforces standardized processes, driving consistency and eliminating variability. At the same time, they are accountable for optimizing kitchen throughput, maximizing efficiency, and ensuring on-time and in-full delivery to assembly (ie Make & Pack) in a fast-paced and demanding operational environment.
3. Production Planning, ERP/MRP & Process Control
The Executive Chef owns the end-to-end food production planning process, including the Master Production Schedule (MPS) for the kitchen and detailed production sequencing required to meet dynamic customer demand. Leveraging ERP and MRP systems, they ensure accurate material planning, capacity alignment, and real-time execution tracking.
This role demands rigorous control over batch sheets and work orders, ensuring data accuracy and operational discipline at every stage. The Executive Chef implements structured process control mechanisms to reduce variability, enhance predictability, and improve overall system performance. Close collaboration with planning, procurement, and logistics functions is essential to ensure a synchronized and efficient supply chain, from raw materials to finished product.
4. Quality Management
The Executive Chef is a driving force behind the implementation of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles across the entire food production and assembly operation. They establish and enforce "gold standard", recipes accuracy, specifications, and procedures that define excellence in product quality and consistency.
Through structured meal tasting and batch validation programs, combined with clearly defined quality checkpoints, the Executive Chef ensures that every product meets rigorous standards before reaching the customer. Strong emphasis is placed on portion control and uniformity, critical in a high-volume airline catering context.
Continuous improvement is a core expectation, with the Executive Chef actively leveraging customer feedback, operational data, and quality metrics to refine processes, elevate standards, and foster a culture of culinary excellence.
5. Business Performance & KPI Management
The Executive Chef is fully accountable for operational performance, owning a comprehensive set of KPIs that reflect both efficiency and effectiveness. These include food cost percentage, labor cost and productivity, food waste, yield accuracy, portion consistency, and on-time delivery.
Through rigorous analysis of performance data, the Executive Chef identifies trends, gaps, and improvement opportunities, driving both corrective and preventive actions. They play a key role in building a culture where decisions are grounded in data and performance management is embedded at every level of the operation.
Maintaining tight control over cooked food inventory, food cost performance and labor productivity is central to the role. The Executive Chef ensures strict adherence to FIFO principles, safeguarding product freshness while minimizing waste and obsolescence.
They actively monitor and manage key cost drivers, including food cost (COGS), waste levels, recipes yield accuracy and inventory variances, taking corrective action where necessary.
6. Team Leadership, Training & Development
At the core of this role is the ability to lead, inspire, and develop a large and diverse team, including chefs, supervisors, and production staff. The Executive Chef fosters a high-performance culture characterized by accountability, discipline, and continuous improvement.
They are responsible for designing and implementing comprehensive training programs that reinforce food safety, process adherence, and operational excellence. Beyond immediate performance, the Executive Chef invests in long-term capability building, developing future leaders and establishing robust succession pipelines to sustain organizational success.
7. Advanced Food Production Techniques
The Executive Chef brings a strong understanding of modern food processing technologies and their application in a large-scale production environment. This includes methods such as sous-vide, hot-fill processing, pasteurization, and other shelf-life extension techniques.
They ensure that these methods are properly implemented, validated, and controlled, delivering products that meet the highest standards of safety, consistency, and quality. A key responsibility is balancing technological advancement with culinary integrity, ensuring that extended shelf life does not come at the expense of product excellence.
8. Cross-Functional Collaboration
Operating at the center of a complex organization, the Executive Chef works closely with multiple stakeholders, including Supply Chain Planning, Buyers, Quality Assurance, process engineering, Maintenance, and Commercial teams.
They ensure alignment between production capabilities and customer requirements, navigating operational constraints while maintaining service excellence. Additionally, the Executive Chef partners
with corporate functions to drive strategic initiatives, innovation, and transformation efforts, contributing to the long-term success and competitiveness of the organization
Qualifications
Education:

• Bachelor's degree in: Industrial Engineering, Process Engineering, Food Engineering, or related field (preferred). Culinary qualifications are a plus but not mandatory

Work Experience:

• Minimum 10+ years of hands-on leadership experience in:
• Large-scale food manufacturing / production environments (strongly preferred)
• Airline catering or high-volume institutional catering
• Proven experience as Production Manager / Culinary Operations Leader
• Experience implementing Lean food production/manufacturing & Continuous Improvement methodologies
• Demonstrated experience with ERP/MRP systems (MPS, production planning)

Technical Skills: (Certification, Licenses and Registration)
Deep knowledge of:

• Food safety systems (HACCP, GMP, FDA/USDA compliance)
• Industrial-scale food production processes
• Production planning and scheduling

Strong understanding of:

• KPIs and operational financial drivers
• Inventory and cost control
• Hands-on capability with batch control, process standardization, and quality systems

Leadership & Behavioral Competencies

• Strong leadership and people development skills
• Analytical mindset with structured problem-solving approach
• Ability to operate calmly and effectively under high pressure and complexity
• High level of discipline, rigor, and attention to detail
• Strong collaboration and stakeholder management capabilities
• Change agent with continuous improvement mindset

Technical Skills: (Certificates, Licenses and Registration)

• ServSafe Certified preferred.

Language / Communication Skills:

• Must have excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Multi-lingual a plus.

Job Dimensions
Geographic Responsibility: Unit
Type of Employment: Full-Time
Travel %: Yes - Up to 10%
Exemption Classification: Exempt
Internal Relationships: all internal departments
External Relationships: airline customers
Work Environment / Requirements of the Job:

• Regularly, stands, bends, lifts, and moves intermittently during shifts of 10+ hours.
• In a normal production kitchen facility there may be physical discomfort due to temperature and noise.
• Must be able to lift, push, pull and move product, equipment, supplies, etc., in excess of twenty-five (25) pounds.
• A rotating schedule of over 55 hours per week is typical.

Gate Group Competencies Required to be Successful in the Job:

• Thinking - Information Search and analysis & problem resolution skills
• Engaging - Understanding others, Team Leadership and Developing People
• Inspiring - Influencing and building relationships, Motivating and Inspiring, Communicating effectively
• Achieving - Delivering business results under pressure, Championing Performance Improvement and Customer Focus

Demonstrated Values to be Successful in the Position
Employees at gategroup are expected to live our Values of Excellence, Integrity, Passion and Accountability. To demonstrate these Values, we expect to observe the following from everyone:

• We treat each other with respect and we act with integrity
• We communicate and keep each other informed
• We put our heads together to problem solve and deliver excellence as a team
• We have passion for our work and we pay attention to the little details
• We foster an environment of accountability, take responsibility for our actions and learn from our mistakes
• We do what we say we will do, when we say we are going to do it
• We care about our coworkers, always taking an opportunity to make someone's day better

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by the individual(s) assigned to this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and skills required. Management reserves the right to modify, add, or remove duties and to assign other duties as necessary. In addition, reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this position.
gategroup is an equal opportunity employer committed to workforce diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status or other category under applicable law.
For further information regarding Equal Employment Opportunity, copy and paste the following URL into your web browser: http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/posters/pdf/eeopost.pdf
We anticipate that this job will close on:
07/01/2026
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