Canteen Assistant CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is a canteen assistant at a large state school who works the serving counter, the till and the dish area. The name, employers and school are made up. If you work in a hospital, a factory canteen or a staff café, keep the layout and swap in your meal counts and your service window.

Canteen managers hire in a hurry and lose people the same way. Four things get read before anything else.

• Do you have a food hygiene certificate already? UK law does not require a card to work with food, but employers must make sure food handlers are trained, so most ask for a Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety certificate. A manager who does not have to wait for you to get one will take you first, so do the course before you apply if you can.
• Can you handle the rush? Give the number of meals and the length of the service window. Serving 450 lunches in 95 minutes is a completely different skill from serving 450 across a day, and only the number tells them which one you have done.
• Do you understand food safety in practice? Temperature records, cooling, sanitiser dilution, allergen separation. Naming these tells a manager you have worked somewhere inspected.
• Will you turn up? School and hospital kitchens run to fixed times and one absence puts the counter behind. Attendance, years at one employer and early-shift availability all belong on this CV.

“The line I look for is the meal count and the time window. That single number tells me if this person has stood in front of four hundred hungry kids with twenty minutes left. And I always check for a food hygiene certificate, because that is two weeks I do not have to wait.”

Two or three lines. Meals served, setting, certificate, availability. If you are brand new, use a career objective and lead with availability and your food hygiene certificate.

Nearly every canteen CV copies the same duty list. Put the count, the temperature, the time window or the money into the same sentence and it becomes evidence.

Group them so a manager can see which stations you can cover without training. Canteen staffing is a puzzle of who can work which station, and a CV that answers it is easy to say yes to.

• Service: serving counter, portion control with scoops and portion ladles, plating to a standard, queue management, School Food Standards portions, counter and deli service
• Food prep: sandwiches, salads and cold prep, batch cooking to production sheets, bain-marie, combi oven, bratt pan, slicer, knife safety
• Food safety: hot holding (63°C) and cold holding (5°C), temperature records, cooling and reheating, cross-contamination control, the 14 allergens, date labelling, FIFO rotation, sanitiser dilution and test strips
• Cleaning: dishwasher operation and temperature checks, pot wash sinks, chemical handling under COSHH and safety data sheets, daily and deep cleaning schedules
• Front of house: EPOS till, cash and card handling, meal counting, cashless pupil payment systems, stock counts
• People skills the job actually needs: staying pleasant at minute 80 of a rush, working with children or patients, speaking clearly with people who have dietary requirements, and teamwork in a small kitchen where one absence is felt
• Availability, which is a skill on this CV: early starts, split shifts, term-time patterns, holiday cover

This is a short section on most CVs and it matters more than the education section. List what you hold with the year, and say if you can complete something before your start date.

• Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety certificate. UK law does not set a single required qualification, but employers must make sure food handlers are trained and supervised, and this certificate is what most canteens ask for. It is usually an inexpensive online course and a test, and having it already makes you cheaper to hire.
• Level 3 Award in Supervising Food Safety if you want to move towards a lead or kitchen supervisor role. Give the year you took it, as many employers ask for a refresher every few years.
• Allergen training, such as the free Food Standards Agency online course or a Level 2 allergen award. In UK school and hospital kitchens handling the 14 allergens is a serious part of the job, and this is a short course that shows you take it seriously.
• In-house training hours. School caterers and council catering teams often run yearly training on school food rules and allergens, so if you have logged hours, say how many and for which school year.
• An NVQ or apprenticeship in hospitality or catering, if you have started one. These are the recognised route for school kitchen staff who want to progress to cook or kitchen supervisor.
• Emergency First Aid at Work, which several schools and care settings prefer.
• Your DBS check, which schools and care settings require. Say it is current, or that you are on the DBS Update Service, rather than giving details.

One naming note: canteen assistant and catering assistant are the usual UK job titles, and councils and contract caterers also advertise school catering assistant or kitchen assistant roles. In the US the same work is posted as cafeteria worker or food service worker, and the document is called a resume. Use the advert's title in your personal statement, and keep UK CV conventions: no photo, no date of birth.

This is one of the easiest fields to enter and one of the hardest to keep staffed. Managers care about your availability and your reliability far more than your history.

1. 1Career objective, three lines: the role, your availability (early starts, term time, split shifts), and your food hygiene certificate or the fact you will complete one before starting.
2. 2Get a Level 2 Food Hygiene and Safety certificate first. It is usually a couple of hours online and a small fee, and it removes the main reason to pass you over.
3. 3Turn any customer-facing work into service numbers: people served a day, transactions handled, till accuracy, queue speed.
4. 4Include home and volunteer cooking honestly: church or community meals, school events, family catering. Say how many people you cooked or served for.
5. 5State plainly that you can stand for a full shift, lift 10 to 20 kg and work in a hot kitchen. Managers screen on this and few applicants write it.
6. 6Give two references who can vouch for attendance, ideally a supervisor. Attendance is the thing this job is lost over.
7. 7Keep it to one page and put your availability at the top, not the bottom.

• One page, always. This is not a two-page job.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status on a UK CV.
• Plain single column with clear headings. Councils, academy trusts and large contract caterers screen through an ATS and columns break.
• Availability line near the top: the hours, the days and whether you want term-time only.
• Put your food hygiene certificate in the top third, not buried at the bottom.
• If you are applying to several settings, adjust the words. Schools want the School Food Standards, meal counts and pupil allergies. Hospitals want diet cards and tray accuracy. Workplace restaurants want covers, catering and till work.