Food and Beverage Manager

Permanent, Full Time

Up to £33,617.10 per annum

Location: Braintree

Closing Date: 19th September 2021

This post is based at Cressing Temple. There will be a two stage interview process.

About us

At Essex County Council we're already making plans to ensure our long-term economic recovery. We're taking this opportunity to create a greener, more productive, and fairer economy that is stronger and more resilient than ever before.

Economic growth is the number one priority for Essex County Council. We want to establish Essex as a great location for the world's top businesses and ensure that it's the best possible place to live and work. Our rich mix of urban, rural and coastal economies, and our growing transport links (including an international airport) mean we're poised for future success.

The Culture, Heritage and Green Spaces department will deliver exceptional customer experiences, increase resilience against climate change, demonstrating the benefit of Essex's strategic location, with the objective of developing a financially sustainable operation. And it starts with growing our team.

About the role

The Food and Beverage Manager will be responsible for managing all operational aspects of the café and retail operations in Country Parks including menu development, stock control, food hygiene standards and the development and implementation of processes, ways of working and operating practices, whilst continually ensuring the service is delivering an excellent visitor experience.

As a manager, you will be responsible for planning, implementing, and monitoring staffing levels and rotas across the café and retail service, ensuring employees are working efficiently, whilst maximising sales, revenue and profitability, and making recommendations for effective change. You will also provide guidance to your employees, and handle matters relating to recruitment, induction, training, work planning, evaluating performance, and managing conduct and disciplinary matters.

As a leader, you should develop a continuous improvement ethos amongst your employees, encouraging them to challenge current working methods and process to maximise efficiency and add value to the service. You will be confident in defining processes, identifying customer needs, and responding proactively, and contributing to new projects across Country Parks, providing innovative solutions and ideas.

You will also support in the development and enhancement of reporting systems, ensuring insights on sales and performance metric inform management decisions.

This role will also be accountable for budgetary control, ensuring compliance with all financial processes, and ensuring cafes are managed within budgeted guidelines. You will be responsible for implementing robust systems to monitor and review service performance to ensure the service is achieving its financial and quality targets. This includes responsibility for health and safety and property related issues across the Country Parks estate.

Strong collaboration is also key to this role. You will need to be able to network extensively and build strong partnerships, specifically with Local Authority Environmental Health Officers and other internal and external stakeholders.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

We're looking for an excellent leader, with strong communication, excellent attention to detail, guest orientated, and good people management skills, with experience in food and beverage management, and an understanding of food and beverage trends and best practices

Ideally, you will have a culinary school diploma or higher-level qualification in food service management, or equivalent experience

You should be analytical in your approach, commercially astute and able to identify opportunities for business change and improvement, resolving problems efficiently. You should be able to demonstrate budget management, with the ability to manage personnel and meeting financial targets.

This role requires someone with initiative, able to resolve problems, multitask, delegate and make improvements, whilst also managing their employees effectively. Naturally you should work well within a team, have excellent time management skills, confident in prioritising tasks, and strong IT skills.

Above all, we are looking for someone you can demonstrate considerable enthusiasm and energy, together with being highly motivated for what can be achieved.

Benefits

In return, we offer an excellent benefits package to all our employees. It is important to us that you have a healthy work/life balance, which is why we are proud to offer flexible working. The package also includes a clear career path which will encourage gifted, committed individuals to grow with the opportunity for progression and promotion, a local government pension scheme, minimum annual leave of 26 days per year, discounted shopping and much more. Find out more about our benefits here.

Apply and next steps

At Essex County Council, we seek the best talent from the widest pool of people - diversity is key to our success and we want to hear from every part of the community.

To apply, please visit our website - www.workingforessex.com

As part of employment with Essex County Council should your role require a DBS check you will be required to register with the DBS update service. The DBS update service ensures all registered DBS certificates are kept up to date and allows authorised parties to view the status of your certificate. This is an annual subscription and you will be responsible for ensuring this is maintained. For further information on the DBS update service please visit: https://www.gov.uk/dbs-update-service

Essex County Council is proud to offer an excellent benefits package to all its employees. For more information please use the following link: https://www.workingforessex.com/working-here/pay-reward/