Sidework

Every now and then, a little lightbulb idea quietly changes the food world—aright-sized, effective innovation that earns a coveted spot in the pantheon of “what did people do before…?” creations. The offset fish spatula, portable electric fencing for small farms, blue painter’s tape in restaurant kitchens—game changers, each one. Taylor Cocalis had such an idea in 2009 and it gave us the jobs website Good Food Jobs.

Before 2010, where did the aspirational and idealistic young professional looking for a good food job—a position with a company or organization situated somewhere in the evolving “good food” economy—go to find opportunities? Craigslist was probably the most widely used jobs board in the aughts, but it was a primeval, dodgy mess. For food systems idealists, there were clunky, niche listservs that released a trickle of job postings. For the people in between, those who wanted to build a career in food but not necessarily in restaurants, there wasn’t much.

So back to 2009. Taylor was finishing up a stint at Murray’s Cheese as an educator and looking for her next job. The kinds of job postings she was looking for didn’t seem to have a home—an equivalent to Media Bistro for the emerging ecosystem of companies, non-profits, farms, artisans, farm-to-table restaurants, and others combining good values, good business, and/or good deeds. She reached out to her friend Dorothy Neagle with an idea to make one. They serendipitously met website developer Efy Tal and the Good Food Jobs website was born shortly thereafter.

Almost 15 years later, GFJ has secured its position as a go-to jobs website for a surprisingly wide slice of food world employers—farms, restaurants, non-profits, camps, CPG brands, retail stores, cheesemakers, ranches, distributors and more. These skew towards employers looking for high quality, passionate candidates who (by the design of the website) have to make the effort to email a resume, rather than just click a link to submit a profile.For their part, the typical GFJ job seeker is one who’s looking for mission-driven employers who care about sustainability, good employment practices, local foods, social justice, awesome food, or something else that they won’t quite find on other job boards.

To-date, GFJ has posted around 70,000 jobs since launching and at any given time, there are around 400-500 postings on the site. About half of which are usually with farms, a quarter relating to food service of one kind or another, and a quarter in the non-profit sector, with some overlap among those categories. At the margins, you find the occasional high-paying managerial job, opportunities in media, or a business for sale.

Everyone of the job posts since they launched has been looked at by Taylor, Dorothy, or someone else on their very small team to be sure it meets their standards. They ask employers to adhere to simple but worthy standards on issues like livable wages, pay transparency, and removing unnecessary job requirements (e.g. requiring driver’s license when driving is not really the job).

Despite the option to relax those standards, find less hands-on ways of vetting posts, and grow their reach in a more conventional social media marketing, advertising-driven way, GFJ is not choosing that path. As Taylor explained it, “Everyone's always like, yes, you're supposed to grow, grow, grow. And there is a certain value to that but there’s also an elegance to the people who have found us over all these years—it's a very self-selecting audience. The caliber of people on the job-posting side and on the job-seeking side have been very aligned.”

What really makes Taylor happy is meeting people who’ve used GFJ for years, with real impacts on the evolution of their professional and personal lives—jobs landed, applicants hired, spouses met, babies made. Today she’s thinking about ways to take those connections more off-line again, perhaps a “platonic Tinder…a way for people to meet up, go eat this delicious thing, make a pie together, organize a gathering.” Maybe even not so platonic…a GFJ dating site? Crazier ideas have worked.

Hospitality Career Paths is a website from Culinary Agents that’s a bit like Glassdoor for F&B jobs only. It could become a great resource for hospitality professionals and groups if a lot more data gets fed into it.

Oyster Sunday put together this database of job boards back in the pandemic days—it’s worth bookmarking and exploring.‍

Thinking Food Jobs is a Substack that shares interesting job opportunities in the food world every week, most of them not in food service or restaurants. Here are some intriguing positions from the most recent issue:

--> Copywriter at Athletic Brewing Co. ($80-100K annual)

--> Consulting Chef at the Culinary Institute of America ($75/hour)

--> Supply Chain & Sustainability Analyst at Just Salad ($80-90K annual)