A cloud kitchen has no dining room and no walk-in guests. A lean team cooks for several brands from one kitchen, to the rhythm of app orders, where a bad rating arrives within the hour.
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Share your requirementsA cloud kitchen cooks only for delivery. Orders come through aggregator apps and the brand's own channels, and the kitchen may run several brands from one line, so a cook handles different menus in the same hour. There is no front of house, so every employee is in prep, cooking, packing or dispatch. Teams are lean, shift patterns follow order peaks and the brand's reputation is built on ratings. When operators open several kitchens in different parts of the city, consistent hiring and training becomes a daily test. The wider food and beverage hub covers what the sector shares.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in cloud kitchens. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
A cook must hold the recipes of several brands in mind during a rush, and mix-ups of sauces, portions and packaging follow.
A promotion or a rainy evening sends orders up within minutes, and a lean team cannot flex, so ratings and refunds suffer.
Staff never meet the customer, and complaints arrive as ratings and screenshots, which is hard to turn into learning.
Opening a second or third kitchen means finding a head, a line and prep crew in a short time, while the first kitchen is still settling.
As brands are added or dropped, cooks move between menus and stations without a clear view of their new role or pay.
Kitchens run until late, staff are away from the public and the work can feel isolating, so interest fades.
The operator tracks orders and ratings closely but has little on who joined, who left and who is ready to move up.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Organisation Design; HR Analytics and Management Reporting. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for food and beverage, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when, and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes, one for complaints, one for conduct, kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why, and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a cloud kitchens business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Use order counts by hour and brand to decide the number of cooks, packers and prep staff for each shift.
Use order counts by hour and brand to decide the number of cooks, packers and prep staff for each shift. The HR strategy and workforce planning work covers it.
One card per dish, photographed, kept at the station, with portion, sauce and packing details.
One card per dish, photographed, kept at the station, with portion, sauce and packing details. New cooks learn from it before touching the line.
Write which roles are tied to one brand and which cover several, with clear lines of reporting.
Write which roles are tied to one brand and which cover several, with clear lines of reporting. See role design.
A set of role profiles, a hiring route, an induction and a first-month plan that can be used for each new kitchen.
A set of role profiles, a hiring route, an induction and a first-month plan that can be used for each new kitchen.
Show staff the comments and ratings that relate to their shifts, along with a thank you for good ones, so that quality is visible.
Show staff the comments and ratings that relate to their shifts, along with a thank you for good ones, so that quality is visible.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. Work through the checks using a recent operating period. The time needed depends on the records you hold; note missing evidence and use the findings to choose a priority.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A staffing plan by brand, hour and kitchen, ready for new openings and slow periods.
Clear roles for multi-brand cooks, packers and dispatch staff, with reporting lines.
Simple people numbers by kitchen, such as joiners, leavers and tenure, to sit beside order data.
Routines for late shifts, heat, knife and fryer work and tired staff in lean kitchens.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in food and beverage, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Kitchen, service and outlet staff leave quickly in food and beverage. How to ask what lies behind the first answer, compare outlets and act on what you learn.
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How a D2C founder can decide which digital marketing work to hire for, which to buy from an agency, and which to split, with a worksheet and a five step plan.
6 min readRead article
A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
6 min readRead article
Six numbers, one page, same format each month. What they are, how to define them so they mean the same thing twice, and what each one tells you.
8 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
There is no fixed number. Count orders by hour for each brand, see how many dishes one cook can manage and plan from that. Start with a small, cross-trained team and add as the numbers prove it.
Use a recipe card per dish, teach one brand at a time and sign each off after a practical check. Add the next brand only when the first is steady, and avoid changing menus mid-shift.
Look at the order data for the shift and ask who was on. Use the cause, such as a missing item, a delay or a packing fault, to adjust the process, then share the finding with the team without blaming one person.
Keep a standard role profile, a practical trial and an induction pack that you reuse. Move one trusted head or sous from an existing kitchen to set the standard and train the new team.
Common reasons are late hours, pace, shifting menus and a lack of visible growth. Ask leavers directly, record the reasons by kitchen and act on the pattern, not the single story.
We would ask how many dishes a cook handles per shift, what the ratings show about staffing and how a new kitchen would be hired today. A workforce plan by brand and hour with a reusable opening pack is a good first job, and scope is written down for your sign-off.
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See all HR topics for food and beverage, or another industry.
Tell us your industry, team size and the issue you want to address. Bring one example of where work gets delayed or ownership is unclear, and the deadline or decision you are working towards.
