From Kitchen to Career: Boosting NYC Culinary Workforce Recruitment

The work bridged policy and execution, offering the City a clear path to stabilize a critical workforce and ensure that the people preparing meals in its most demanding environments are seen, supported, and able to stay.

This Capstone project, From Kitchen to Career: Boosting NYC Culinary Workforce Recruitment, in partnership with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, is focused on the unique culinary hiring challenges of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and the Department of Correction (DOC). These agencies serve over 31,000 meals a day to people in Rikers Island and youth in juvenile detention centers, yet struggle to hire and retain the culinary workers who make it possible. 

The team conducted 34 interviews with DOC and ACS agency leaders, frontline culinary workers at these facilities, and workforce development organizations across NYC. The findings showed that the root causes of these shortages were concentrated in low wages, job classification standardization when the jobs are vastly different from other city agency culinary workers, and the approach the city takes to its job postings and recruitment methods.

The team responded with five targeted, implementable solutions: reclassifying culinary roles to reflect risk and increase pay, unlocking frozen hiring capacity through labor policy reform, building a Culinary Workforce Coalition to strengthen recruitment and training pipelines, redesigning job postings to reflect purpose and career pathways, and improving workplace conditions and recognition to retain staff. 

The work bridged policy and execution, offering the City a clear path to stabilize a critical workforce and ensure that the people preparing meals in its most demanding environments are seen, supported, and able to stay.