Food Production Operative - With Lean Manufacturing & Process Improvement
The Calzone Kitchen · Great Brickhill, Buckinghamshire, MK17 9FX £27,500 – £31,000 per year (£12.85 – £14.45 per hour) · Full-time & part-time available
The job
We hand-fold artisan calzones and deliver them frozen to customers across England, Wales and the major Scottish cities, plus the occasional street food event and private celebration. Family-run, growing fast, based in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
Most of our revenue comes from people who ordered once and came back — because the product is consistently excellent. Protecting that while we scale is the challenge you'd be helping us solve.
We're building a kitchen that runs on lean manufacturing principles, not guesswork. So you'll make product — hand-folding, filling, finishing, packing, to a high standard every shift — but you'll also learn to measure a process, spot waste, test a change and prove it worked. Standard work, cycle times, 5S, changeover reduction: taught properly, and applied to real problems from your first weeks. As you grow, there's genuine scope to work on recipes and new products.
If you want a job where you clock in, do the same thing for eight hours and clock out, this isn't it. If you want to look back in two years and realise you've learned a genuinely valuable trade, keep reading.
The details
- Pay: £12.85 – £14.45 per hour, depending on experience (£27,500 – £31,000 a year at full hours)
- Hours: up to 41.25 paid hours per week, over 5 days
- Shifts: 9 hours: 6am–3pm, 7am–4pm (most common) or 8am–5pm.
- Full-time (part time potentially available)
- Immediate start available
What you need
- A full UK driving licence and your own vehicle — we're genuinely rural, with no public transport nearby
- To be comfortable on your feet for a 9-hour shift, moving between chilled and ambient areas, and lifting up to 15kg
- Reliability, and the confidence to speak up rather than quietly work around a problem
- Real curiosity about how things work and how they could work better. No experience needed — we'll train you. Previous food production, kitchen or manufacturing experience helps, as does any exposure to lean manufacturing or continuous improvement, or a Level 2 Food Safety certificate.
Being straight with you
It's fast-paced, it's physical, the alarms are early, and you'll be tired in the first few weeks. Production doesn't wait.
In return: two pay reviews a year plus a probation review at three months, free lunch made in-house, fresh fruit, team socials, and real progression, we're growing, and we promote from within first. Good improvement ideas get tried here regardless of who they come from. It's a small team, everyone knows everyone, and we're deliberate about making it somewhere people actually want to come back to on Monday.
How to apply
Send a CV, or just a short message telling us one thing you've improved — at work, at home, anywhere. It doesn't have to be impressive; we're interested in how you think. We read every application ourselves and we don't hang about, so keep your phone on.
Job Types: Full-time, Part-time, Permanent
Pay: £27,500.00-£31,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Casual dress
- Company events
- Discounted or free food
- Employee discount
- On-site parking
Experience:
- Food production: 1 year (preferred)
Licence/Certification:
- Driving Licence (required)
Work Location: In person
