Fifteen-hour shifts, high levels of stress and anxiety, verbal and even physical abuse – these, sadly, are things which far too many chefs have experienced at some point in their career. The unhealthy culture surrounding kitchens is something which has been on people’s radars for many years but the #FairKitchens movement is now finally doing something about it. Set up in 2018 by Unilever Food Solutions and a group of chefs determined on making the industry fairer and less toxic, #FairKitchens believes that a kitchen can only truly thrive if it has a solid, happy team at its heart. That’s why, since launching, the founders of the movement have been on a mission to open up the conversation around kitchen culture, recognising the issues and trying to offer solutions.
The most recent of these solutions is #FairKitchens’ brand-new, free leadership training programme, ‘Leading a Fair Kitchen’, which has been developed to help provide support and tips to those at the helm of a kitchen so that they can create the best working environment possible for their staff. ‘We realised that if we wanted the culture to change, it had to start at the top,’ explains #FairKitchens chef ambassador Alex Hall, who helped develop the programme, ‘when I look at my own training, I was promoted up through the ranks but was never taught to lead and that’s a really common theme in the industry. People teach themselves how to cope with certain scenarios but very little actual support is given back of house in terms of training and development. Change needs to happen from the top but for that to happen chefs need to know how to be good leaders. That’s where the idea for the leadership training programme was born.’
Developed in collaboration with the Culinary Institute of America, along with over thirty chefs from around the world, the programme is offered for free online and is comprised of seven different modules, each of which coaches head chefs through different elements of leadership. Modules consist of short videos featuring top chefs including Ruth Hansom and Chris Galvin, with suggested tasks to complete at the end and the chance to earn an official certificate of completion after a final assessment. At its core, #FairKitchens’ leadership training programme is about giving chefs a chance to learn everything from how to spot wellbeing issues, to how to share your values with a team, instead of them simply mirroring the practices of their own past-head chefs.