Food Services Manager cover letter examples by experience level

Use this example

A food services manager cover letter is a one-page letter telling a client or a contract company which account you hold, how many meals leave your kitchens each day, and what happened the last time an auditor walked in.

In practice, the reader is rarely a chef and often not a foodservice person at all: a business official usually decides school nutrition posts, an administrator senior living, a facilities lead corporate dining. Above all, they are buying predictability in front of a population that cannot go elsewhere, and they read your letter for evidence that nothing surprising happens on your watch.

Guide to a food services manager cover letter

Specifically, this guide and the corresponding food services manager cover letter example will cover:

• First, how to structure the letter, paragraph by paragraph
• Then, why the account profile belongs in your first three sentences
• How to clear a federal hiring standard before the reader has to check
• Also, what counts as evidence in each non-commercial segment
• Finally, the openings that keep a reader on a file to the end

How to write a food services manager cover letter

A food services manager cover letter example you can adapt

Dear Mr. Farwell,
I am applying for the Director of School Nutrition post at Amberton Community School District. I currently hold the Ketteridge Community School District account for Prairiegate Dining Services: 11 schools, 6,800 students, 4,900 lunches and 1,800 breakfasts a day, 41 staff and $3.2M in managed volume. With a bachelor's degree in food service management and five years directing school nutrition programs, I meet the USDA professional standards hiring requirement at 7 CFR 210.30 for a district of 10,000 students or more.
Two results are worth your time. Lunch average daily participation at Ketteridge went from 64 percent to 72 percent across two school years, which I got by rebuilding the four-week cycle menu around student tasting panels and opening a second serving line at the high school to cut queue time. Over the same period food cost per meal held at $1.38 through a commodity price year, using a USDA Foods entitlement plan built with the business office each spring. The state agency administrative review in our last cycle closed with no fiscal action across meal pattern, counting and claiming, offer versus serve and civil rights.
Amberton is roughly twice the size of my current account and runs its own central production kitchen, which is the part I would want to look at first. Moving from 11 sites to 19 changes the transport window before it changes anything else, and that is usually where meals per labor hour is won or lost. I also noticed the board minutes from March record a discussion about breakfast participation, which at 26 percent at Ketteridge is the number I have spent the most time on.
I hold a Certified Dietary Manager, Certified Food Protection Professional credential and a current food protection manager certification, and I have completed the full 12 hours of continuing education in each of the last five school years. I can give six weeks notice. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Gwendolyn Pritchard

Openings that work

Clear the hiring standard in the first paragraph

Regulators often require non-commercial employers to document that the person they hired was eligible, so saying it yourself saves them a step.

In school nutrition, the USDA professional standards at 7 CFR 210.30 set the minimum for a new school nutrition program director by district enrollment: at 2,499 students or fewer a high school diploma with three years of relevant food service experience can qualify, while at 10,000 students or more the district needs a bachelor's degree plus a relevant major, a state-recognized certificate, or five years of experience managing school nutrition programs. New directors complete eight hours of food safety training within five years before their start date or within 30 calendar days of it, then 12 hours of continuing education a year.

For example, in long-term care, 42 CFR 483.60 requires the director of food and nutrition services to be a certified dietary manager, a certified food service manager, to hold a similar national certification, or to hold an associate's or higher degree in food service management or hospitality. For this reason, name your route in the regulation's own words.

What counts as evidence in a non-commercial account

Length, format and sending it

One page, four paragraphs, 300 to 400 words. PDF, named for yourself and the post: gwendolyn-pritchard-school-nutrition-director-cover-letter.pdf.

Address a person. Business officials and administrators are published on nearly every organization's site, and a board packet will usually name them. Match the figures to your resume; our food services manager resume example uses the same account and numbers as the letter above. If the portal has a character limit, keep the first paragraph intact and cut from the third.

Key takeaways

1. First, name the account in the first sentence: client, sites, meals a day, people served.
2. Then state the hiring standard you meet, in the regulation's own words.
3. Next, give one result with a number, a period and the method behind it.
4. Name the audit and its outcome, because it is a documented event.
5. In addition, reference one real thing from their own records.
6. Say what you would look at first, and why.
7. Finally, one page, four paragraphs, to a named person.

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