food service worker

cook

food unit lead

dishwasher

delivery driver

Chartwells K12

This is a job for people who need passive income. Getting 40 hours a week is next to impossible, because you're only working the hours school is in session give or take an hour. If your school district budgets snow day pay for support staff, great. If not, Chartwells won't pay you for the missed work at no fault of your own.  The pay itself is garbage, minimum wage or maybe a couple cents above.  In two years, I have only received a 1% raise, but not without added responsibilities!
Low wages attract bottom of the barrel people and bored retirees who pass off harder work to the more capable. Once upper management sees you as valuable, you will be overloaded with duties never discussed in your interview or job description such as catering to school staff in-service days, extensive record keeping, monthly inventory, ordering products, dealing with vendors, and online training courses you are expected to complete during a work day while simultaneously cooking breakfast/lunch for students- forget about overtime, not as if you will ever get scheduled a full 40, on the off chance you do, a minute over will cause an uproar 
from corporate.  
Consistently understaffed so sick call outs are met with hostility from directors and managers scrambling to find coverage. 
Directors and corporate make a fat salary compared to cafeteria workers putting in grunt work, ~$40k differential. 
Kid interaction ranges from awesome to unsavory. School staff either sees you as an equal or a servant. 
Clock in "app" is just a web page saved to your home screen and is consistently out of service. Upper management will chew you out for missed punches to no fault of your own.  On boarding is messy and time consuming. Chartwells portals are disorganized and hard to navigate for even the most tech savvy. You are required to change your password to access clock in "app" and portals to access your personal employee information (paystubs, w2s, timesheets) multiple times a year. 
Less funded districts will never be able to achieve the lunch program Chartwells dazzles them with on paper. Open campus schools will look at you, a mere underpaid lunch servant, as if it is your fault that student lunch attendance is low.  Chartwells bottom line is making money for them, to see students as commerce, and enticing them with unhealthy options after lunch service.  They do not care about providing food to children, they care about transactions. The school cares that you are abiding by state regulations to keep their lunch program compliant to receive funding, and you are paid a severely underwhelming amount to juggle all of that.  If I had a dollar for every time I say under my breath "I don't get paid enough for this s***t" I wouldn't be writing this review.



I worked for an elementary school through Chartwell's. Management was okay. Short staff Constantly!  HARD WORK! My body felt like i was 90yrs old by the time i was done with my shift everyday and I'm only in my 30's. Not enough pay or benefits and I never felt appreciated at all by the school district staff.  I felt like they excluded us because we are Chartwell's and not through the actual school district.  Other school districts would get bonus at the end of the year, while we only received an apron. The being of the year all the schools would have a lunch at the high school that was all.  I felt like my management depended on me to much because i would get to the school before everyone else,  even management. I was the cook/ mainline and had to be at the school before 6:30 I had to have food ready by 7:00am every morning. There was NEVER enough Time!!  The first year working we lost two employees and it ended up being only me and my manager running a kitchen for an elementary school of 300 Plus kids!(that would eat lunch) They did bring other employees  from other schools in the area, but they sometime couldn't because of understaffed schools.  I felt like an assistant manager with employee pay. Once they hired more employee's I had to help train them and they were always asking me for help and advice even though I wasn't a manager. I would help them because we were a team but, I shouldn't have had to have that responsibility as just an employee. Training is a joke, because manager do not have the time for training as they also have a lot on their plates.  The training is sometimes left for the employee that has been there the longest. which should not be the case. I did learn a lot about nutrition which was nice. I should also mention that not all the employees hired were bad some were very friendly nice and hard working when trained right. 

The most enjoyable part is seeing my kid at work during serving times. building relationships with the children in the school and seeing their face light up when they see you. I LOVED getting to know all the kids names and getting to know their personalities  watching them grow each year was a treat. That was the hardest part about leaving the school. You are also off when the kids are out and on holidays and summer. 

K-12 Chartwells is the division for school lunchrooms, and they come in and onboard you from being a STATE employee to their employee. The transition process is horrible!!! Aside from telling you a wage amount, not one person from any range of job titles can answer a single question about anything from benefits to your work hours until AFTER you’ve onboarded with them and accepted a job. Even then, it’s not until a few days before you start a new school year that you learn how much your insurance will cost, when you need to come to work, and other basic questions that should’ve been answered when they were onboarding. State insurance was $46 a month… Chartwells insurance was $400 a month for just me, and it had higher copay, higher deductible, and less coverage than State Benefits. Only 5 of 12 employees returned for the school year, and Chartwells continues to tell us not to panic, but demands we 5 get the work of 12 done. Demands we take a 30 minute unpaid break that we don’t even get. Promises things like your first pair of shoes are free, when actually the cost is just taken out of your paycheck. Demands huge lunch spreads that can be accomplished in the amount of time allotted. No personal days. Sick days issued in small increments and do not roll over if unused. Much ado training with no measures for practical implementation into daily work. No, I DO NOT recommend this company as an employer. 

A typical day involves overseeing multiple school nutrition operations, ensuring USDA compliance, monitoring labor ratios, optimizing budgets, and supporting kitchen managers. I’ve learned how to manage large-scale K-12 programs, improve participation rates, and lead cross-functional teams while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Management:
Local management varies by district. While there’s room to innovate and make a difference, support from upper leadership can sometimes be inconsistent when it comes to advancement and resourcing.

Workplace Culture:
The day-to-day culture is collaborative at the school level, but corporate priorities often drive decisions that don’t always align with local needs.

Hardest Part:
Balancing compliance, cost control, and student satisfaction while managing limited resources.

Most Enjoyable Part:
Engaging with students and staff, introducing creative menus, and seeing participation numbers grow as a result of new programs.

I handled 2 campuses that were 10 miles apart. Three cafeterias total.
*USDA/NSLP for one
*High School not under those guidelines for I can do REAL FOOD (Yay!)

My unit was different than the others in my region:
*Guaranteed participation
*Government subsidized
*School and Chartwells Made $

I served 2 Charter Schools:
Very different; I had to fight to win participation. I improved student and staff participation by 20% YTD but it was not enough.

Accounting was completely different and the boss of my region was focused on covering her heiny and not on helping me be successful. 

I was the 5th Director at this account; whatever the other guys did, my boss wanted me to fix the quality of food, heal the customer service and hire better staff...DONE!

Being the 5th manager of anything is the kiss of death, which I learned the hard way. In the end, I was transferred to a corporate account and relegated to doing food for a district cafe that wasn't interested in improving food quality, presentation or attracting new business. 

That was my experience!

I worked for Chartwells for 7 years. We were always short handed  the biggest turn over I have ever seen. The more under staffed we were the more they wanted every day. They claim you get benefits but that's not true.  Only the Director, their assistants and maybe a few managers even qualify for benefits.  When schools out you have to fight with unemployment and pray they say yes to only get 80 a week , when there is no school so during summer Thanksgiving,  Christmas and spring break money gets tight . The pay is insulting,  the more you work the better you are the more they want for nothing. It's all about who you know if you are gonna move up in the company they don't care about experience and  Senority it's who they like best. You will be expecting to do the work of 3 people . We only get 30 mins for lunch and never got the 2 15 min breaks that we were supposed to get , they don't even acknowledge breaks you get 30 mins for lunch that's it.  The teachers treat you like trash and Noone respects the food service.  It's a job if you need one but it's not worth writing home about

Chartwells, aka compass group, is far better organized than aramark or sodexo. their financial and other common systems are easy to learn and use, making it easy to go to other accounts. 
for work in food service, this is a great gig- no weekends, nights. its easier to staff for that too because of the work life balance,  
there is a highturnover at the senior level - aka disctrict or VP levels, many of the turns are due to promotions, but still, just when you are learning your bosses style a new one rolls in. Lots of room to grow. Pay is decent.  the only downfall to work there, which is a plus for our clients, is that you're employment is strictly tied to the clients' opinion . doesnt seem bad, except when you go to a client in a very liberal area and you are conservative- they have your head on a platter with no recourse for you. They say you can apply for other positions but I've never seen anyone get a position after a client asks to have them removed. Also takes away employee protections because you don't work for the client, you are a contract service provider so forget any protections you have by law

What is the best part of working at the company?
The people are great to work for and with.  Nice knowing I am doing a big part in helping keeping our kids of tomorrow, our students, happy, healthy, and fed.  The paycheck which helps keep food on my table and the bills paid.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The days through the week that we get called off, means no pay that time, equaling shorter check, which for me isn’t a good thing right now.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Some times it can be a little tense, but not too bad.  People’s different beliefs and things shows up and then they sometimes clashes with others, then the super steps in then to “knock it in the bud”, as they say and get back to normal to getting the job done and the food out.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
A good sense of feeling accomplishment on knowing that the kids don’t go home hungry and  pride in knowing I had apart in helping them learn more to hopefully better our world and themselves each and every day.

Absolutely abhorrent treatment of staff! My manager is almost constantly coming back from meetings crying, there's ridiculous expectations as to prep times vs the amount of staff, and when there is horrific understaffing in one location they refuse to move people from a location that is overstaffed to assist.
 The pay is peanuts for the amount of work, stress, and physical overexertion that occurs. As a young blood, I should not be practically unable to walk from my car to my front door after working and yet that's the case. The level of work we're expected to perform despite being severely understaffed is absolutely ridiculous and upper management doesn't care!
  The only positives I find in the job are the two provided meals, and the people I work with! We're struggling together, and they know this. 

Do NOT work here. They won't change.

The job itself is relatively easy, prep food according to recipes and either run a register, refill a line, or cook during serving time. Clean the line, the floors, dishes, and head home. For managers you get thrown into the deep end a bit, they don’t train you sufficiently and will write you up over things you haven’t been trained on 
The major problem is with upper management, if you want to be promoted you need to be very friendly with the office staff. Especially one person in the office otherwise you’ll be demoted or have your hours reduced. This person just got a promotion (VERY friendly with the regional district manager, not friendly with anyone under her) and if she doesn’t like you she will find ANY reason to get rid of you and she will write you up whether you’ve been properly trained or not. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Food service worker 34 salaries reported	$31.10 per hour
Cook 1 salary reported	$34.50 per hour
Food unit lead 1 salary reported	$19.00 per hour
Dishwasher 1 salary reported	$33.02 per hour
Delivery driver 11 salaries reported	$18.91 per hour

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