Butcher CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is a fully trained butcher in a supermarket and independent shop background who also runs the service counter. The name, shops and college are made up. If you work in a cutting plant or a whole-carcass shop, keep this layout and swap the retail bullets for volume, yield and HACCP bullets.

Butchery managers read fast because they are usually reading between cutting shifts. Four things decide whether you get a trial cut.

• How far can you cut without help? There is a large gap between opening boxes of prepacked product and breaking a hindquarter. Say exactly where you sit: prepacked only, primals to retail cuts, or whole carcass.
• Volume and speed. Kilos a day, primals a week, or offer quantities cut for Christmas. This is the number most butcher CVs are missing, and it is the one that answers whether you can hold a Saturday.
• Yield and wastage. Anyone can cut a steak. Cutting it to spec so the department makes margin is the skill. If you have tracked yield percentages or wastage against a target, put it in.
• Food safety and cleanliness. A current Level 2 or Level 3 food hygiene certificate, temperature logging, and a cleaning routine you can describe. A butchery room fails a food hygiene inspection through habits, and your CV is the only evidence of yours before the interview.

“I can teach cuts. I cannot teach somebody to keep a clean saw and log a chiller temperature without being asked. If the CV mentions cleaning, temperature logs and a wastage number, that person has worked in a real meat room, and I will find a shift for them.”

Use a career objective only if you are new to the trade or switching from another kitchen job. If you have cut for a year or more, write a personal statement instead: years, what you break down, volume, one number.

Most butcher CVs copy a job description word for word. Managers have read that description a thousand times. Add the cut, the animal, the kilos or the yield and it becomes yours.

Split cutting skills from equipment and from the counter side of the job. A butchery manager should be able to see in five seconds which parts of the department you can cover.

• Cutting: beef, pork, lamb and poultry breakdown, primal to sub-primal, boning, seaming, trimming to spec, portion cutting, frenching, rolling and tying joints, butterflying
• Value-added: fresh sausages and burgers, marinating, kebabs and stuffed items, mince by fat content, curing and dry-ageing if you have done it
• Equipment: bandsaw, mincer, mixer-mincer, tenderiser, burger press, slicer, vacuum packer, sausage filler, sharpener and steel
• Food safety: Level 2 or 3 food hygiene, HACCP and CCP records, temperature logs, cold chain, FIFO rotation, allergen and beef origin labelling, cleaning chemical handling (COSHH)
• Department skills: counter set-up and merchandising, yield and wastage control, ordering and deliveries, stock counts, offer and Christmas preparation, scale and label systems
• Customer side: cut-to-order service, special orders, cooking guidance, selling the whole counter rather than one item
• Physical realities worth naming: 5 a.m. starts, standing shifts in a 1°C to 4°C room, lifting boxes of 25 to 35 kg

There is no licence for individual butchers in the UK. What employers check is food hygiene training and, in cutting plants, HACCP. List them with the level and the year you last took or refreshed them.

• Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety (retail or manufacturing). The Level 3 supervising version helps if you want to run a counter or a department. Give the year you last refreshed it.
• Allergen awareness. Butchers make sausages, burgers and marinated lines with allergens in the recipe, and food prepacked for direct sale needs a full ingredients label with allergens emphasised (often called Natasha's Law). A short allergen course is worth a line.
• HACCP training. Expected in FSA-approved cutting plants and increasingly asked for in retail: Level 2 for operatives, Level 3 for supervisors. Name the level and the year.
• Butchery apprenticeship or course. A Level 2 butcher apprenticeship, college butchery courses and in-store training schemes all count. Put the level or duration in.
• Health and safety: manual handling, bandsaw and mincer safety training, or a first aid certificate, if you have them. Saws, mincers and cold floors make safety training worth the line.
• Advanced training, if you have gone that far: an advanced (Level 3) butchery qualification, competition work or trade association courses. Only list what you actually completed.

One more thing that belongs here: how far you are into the trade. Butchery apprenticeships often run 18 months to two years, and saying you moved to solo cutting in month 14 tells a manager more than any certificate. Keep to UK CV conventions: no photo, no date of birth. The same job is often advertised as butcher, butchery assistant or meat counter assistant, so mirror the advert.

Butchery departments hire counter assistants and packers constantly and train the butchers they keep. You are applying for the entry job, so write the CV for that.

1. 1Career objective, three lines: the role you want (butchery counter assistant, apprentice butcher, meat packer), your availability for early starts and weekends, and any food hygiene certificate.
2. 2Say plainly that you can lift 25 kg boxes repeatedly and work a full shift in a cold room. Managers screen on this, and almost nobody writes it.
3. 3Any knife work counts: kitchen prep, deli slicing, fish counter, game or home processing. Describe the actual cutting, not the job title.
4. 4Any food safety training, even an online Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate, goes near the top. It costs little and it removes a hiring obstacle for the shop.
5. 5Reliability evidence: attendance, months at one employer, opening shifts. Butchery rooms start early and the biggest reason apprentices drop out is not turning up.
6. 6Say you want to learn the trade and stay. Turnover is the department's problem, and a candidate who says apprenticeship gets read differently from one who says looking for any position.

• One page. This job is never a two-page CV unless you have run butchery departments for a decade.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status on a UK CV.
• Plain single column, plain headings. Big supermarket chains screen through an ATS and columns or icons come out scrambled.
• Put your availability near the top: early mornings, weekends, bank holidays. Christmas week is the busiest of the year in this department, followed by Easter and summer barbecue weekends.
• List the equipment by name. Bandsaw, mincer, burger press and vacuum packer are searchable words; skilled with tools is not.
• If you are applying to cutting plants as well as shops, keep two versions. Plants want yield, line speed, HACCP and CCP records. Shops want counter set-up, service and wastage.