Contract catering staff in Manchester

We work with regional operations teams at most of the national contract catering providers operating in Greater Manchester. Whether we appear on your central PSL depends on how your procurement runs; some sites book us directly at the regional level under a framework agreement, others book us through group procurement in London. Either route works. If your procurement team wants to add us formally, our Manchester office can issue the insurance certificates, modern slavery statement, and right-to-work process document inside 48 hours.

Yes. MediaCityUK, Salford Quays, and the Trafford business parks are some of the highest-density B&I catchments in Greater Manchester, and we place regularly into those sites. Lead time varies: short-notice sickness cover for a CDP in an MediaCityUK canteen will be confirmed inside two hours because those postcodes sit inside our M1-M4 core response zone. For Trafford Park and the outer business parks the realistic window is 4 to 24 hours depending on notice.

Relief is one-off short-notice cover, usually a same-day or next-day call when a permanent chef is sick or off. Rolling temp is a planned block of cover, typically two to six weeks, used during a permanent recruitment, a long-term sickness, or a maternity gap. Rolling bookings are cheaper per shift because the chef is briefed once and holds the section across the block. Most of our Manchester B&I placements are rolling rather than relief because contract catering is usually planned rather than reactive.

Most of our Manchester contract catering bench has worked under at least one of the large national providers and is used to cooking to a central menu specification rather than a chef-led menu. That matters. A hospitality CDP dropped into a B&I canteen with a 50-page group-office menu spec will slow down; a contract catering CDP will not. When you brief us, tell us the operator and the menu tier and we will shortlist chefs who have cooked that specification before.

Timesheets are signed by the site chef manager at the end of each shift and submitted weekly. Invoices are issued against your purchase order reference with a line per shift, per chef, per site. Our Manchester finance process is built for PSL reconciliation, not for ad-hoc billing, so the back-office work runs cleanly whether you book one chef or twenty across a week. We can also match your internal cost-code format on request.