Catering assistant CV template and example

This catering assistant CV template shows experience in school meals, café service and retail. The Word example combines food preparation, counter service, kitchen hygiene and teamwork, with practical contributions that fit an assistant-level role. The guide also covers kitchen assistant applications, first catering jobs and moving between school, hospital and workplace catering.

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Content of this CV template

How to write a catering assistant CV

A good catering assistant CV makes it easy to picture you working through a service: preparing food, setting up, helping customers, keeping supplies moving and leaving the kitchen ready for the next meal. The strongest examples show how you contribute to that whole routine, with enough detail to distinguish your experience from a general statement about being hardworking.

Lead with the catering work you can bring to the team

Use your opening paragraph to name your setting, experience and most relevant strengths. School meals, a staff restaurant, hospital catering and a café have different rhythms. “Catering assistant with four years in primary-school meals, supporting preparation and service for around 280 lunches a day” gives a clearer introduction than “experienced hospitality professional”.

Follow with two or three strengths that fit the vacancy: preparing cold food, serving a busy counter, maintaining records, working with pupils or handling till transactions. For a kitchen-focused post, give preparation, washing up and hygiene more prominence. For a customer-facing food-service role, bring service, replenishment and communication forward.

Someone applying for a first catering job can use the same approach with relevant previous work. Retail till experience, cleaning to a schedule, handling deliveries or serving refreshments at a community lunch gives you useful evidence to discuss. State the setting so the reader understands how you gained it.

Describe the food service, then your part in it

Introduce each catering job with the workplace, team and type of service. A daily lunch for 200 pupils, a café with continuous orders and a hospital ward meal service involve different demands. If you include meal numbers, make it clear whether they describe the team’s service or the work you handled personally.

Use your bullets to explain the tasks that took most of your time and the responsibility that came with them. Useful details include:

• The preparation you carried out, such as sandwiches, salads, vegetables, breakfast items or portioning.
• How you supported service: setting up counters, serving agreed portions, replenishing dishes or preparing refreshments for meetings.
• Customer-facing work, including EPOS tills, payments, orders and communicating with colleagues during busy periods.
• Delivery checks, date labelling, rotation and maintaining service supplies.
• Dishwashing, equipment cleaning, dining-area turnaround and end-of-service routines.

Two or three specific activities can replace a vague bullet such as “general kitchen duties”. Keep the balance appropriate to the vacancy. If most of your experience is in wash-up and cleaning, explain the volume, equipment and coordination involved, then include any preparation or service cover you have gained.

Show food-safety knowledge through the work you did

Food hygiene, allergen awareness and safe working are important parts of the CV, but a list of abbreviations does not show how you used them. Connect the knowledge to your routine: maintaining fridge and delivery records, following the site’s allergen arrangements, using labelled stock, completing cleaning schedules or reporting an equipment problem.

For example, “Recorded delivery and fridge temperatures, rotated labelled stock and completed daily cleaning checks” gives a clear account of an assistant’s responsibilities. Where you helped with special-diet meals, explain the preparation or service arrangements you followed and who you coordinated with, such as the cook, supervisor or ward team.

In a skills section, group these tasks naturally. “Food safety: temperature records, date labelling, stock rotation and allergen procedures” is more informative than an isolated “HACCP” entry. Keep a separate training section for the course name, provider and date, so practical experience and formal learning are both easy to find.

Bring out the service skills specific to the setting

For school catering, highlight working within a short lunch period, communicating with pupils, preparing for different sittings and cooperating with school staff. Experience in a special school may also demonstrate patient communication and familiarity with individual meal arrangements. Relevant safeguarding training belongs in your development section.

For hospital catering, identify whether your experience was in a central kitchen, staff restaurant or ward service. Include meal trolleys, regeneration equipment, records or ward-team communication where these formed part of your job. This helps the employer understand your experience without having to infer it from the hospital’s name.

For workplace and contract catering, customer service, counter presentation, tills, breakfast and lunch peaks, and refreshments for meetings may be particularly relevant. If you provided cover across sites, explain how you settled into different service routines and worked with the local team.

For cafés and visitor venues, show how you combined preparation with orders, drinks, table clearing and payment. You can adapt the emphasis of the same career history to each vacancy while retaining the details that make the work recognisable.

Choose contributions that fit an assistant-level role

Catering assistants often make useful improvements close to the daily work. Helping reduce unsold sandwiches, reorganising service supplies, training a starter or preparing an additional sitting can all strengthen the CV. Explain what changed and how you contributed.

Numbers can show scale without turning every duty into an achievement. The example gives the kitchen’s approximate daily meal volume, identifies three starters supported and describes a four-week review of unsold portions. These are different kinds of evidence: workload, trust from the team and a practical improvement.

If you have no recorded percentages or savings, use specific outcomes. You might have helped introduce a clearer closing checklist, supported an event alongside normal lunch service, or become the regular person asked to show new colleagues the till. Describe the action and benefit in straightforward language.

Long experience also offers evidence of breadth. Covering breakfast as well as lunch, moving between preparation and service, or learning a new ordering system can show the flexibility an employer needs. Give a concrete example rather than repeating “flexible” in several sections.

Use earlier experience to support a move into catering

Applicants coming from retail can foreground payments, customer questions, dated stock and deliveries. Cleaning experience can demonstrate following schedules, using equipment and maintaining shared spaces. Care, school or community work may provide relevant evidence of patient communication and reliable teamwork around mealtimes.

Voluntary catering can be a worthwhile entry in its own right. Include the organisation, dates, frequency and tasks: for example, preparing vegetables and serving lunch twice a month for a community group. The recurring commitment and practical work give the reader something more substantial than an interest in cooking.

For applicants with an established catering history, keep unrelated earlier work brief and give recent service experience the space. If you are progressing into regular cooking responsibilities, the chef CV example can help you decide how to present the dishes, sections and production responsibilities that now form part of your role.

Make training and practical availability easy to find

List food-safety qualifications by their actual title and level, with the awarding body or provider and completion date. Add relevant allergen, equipment, cleaning-product or safeguarding training, grouped into a compact entry where appropriate. Recent workplace learning can be valuable alongside a formal certificate.

For a first catering job, a relevant course can sit nearer the top of the CV. For an experienced assistant, put it after the work history, where it supports the responsibilities already described. School qualifications can be kept to a short line unless a particular subject is relevant to the application.

Shift availability matters in catering because a role may involve breakfast starts, lunchtime-only work, weekends or term time. A short additional-information line can clarify a useful match. For mobile posts, include driving and travel information where it directly answers the vacancy’s requirements.

Read your finished work history as a service manager would: can they see what you prepared, who you served, how you worked with others and which routines you could bring to their kitchen? Those details are the substance of a strong catering assistant CV.

Catering Assistant CV FAQs