Pros
Grew a backbone and a strong ability to detect when I and others being mistreated.
Cons
If you have read some of their reviews, you will see repetitive call-outs to union busting, discrimination, unfair business practices, and no benefits. These are all true but I want to share how I started and ended with Union Kitchen. I know you! You are young, looking for a career change, creative, and naive. You stumble on a job posting from this company and it seems perfect. You are supporting entrepreneurs in the food space with what seems like loads of growth. You are thrilled they took a chance on you when you received your offer. Then, you read the employee handbook. The red flags start with the benefits package, or what should be referred to as the benefits empty cardboard box because they do not exist. To be more specific you do not qualify to start accruing PTO, .5 hours per pay period, until you have been with the company for around four months. They offer four paid holidays a year, no 401k match, and the lowest legal health insurance contribution. The employee handbook is a declaration from the ‘executive team’ that they do not and will not care about you. The thing about the Union Kitchen executive team is they are friends before coworkers and extremely lazy. This becomes increasingly obvious the more time you spend at the company. They require ridiculous work hours with little flexibility because they genuinely don’t know how to hold themselves accountable to get their work done. What they do in a day isn’t that complicated and could very easily be completed in less than normal working hours, but the company is run by inexperienced, overly confident, upper-middle-class millennials. They will try to tell you they bootstrapped the whole company, but leave out that daddy let them borrow the boots. I worked on the marketing/sales team. We were essentially the only revenue-producing team on the corporate side. We were responsible for recruiting new entrepreneurs for the CPG accelerator program and selling memberships to their commercial kitchen space as well as producing organic digital marketing materials. Harmless, right? To start, the commercial kitchen is one fire marshal inspection away from being completely shut down. The goal was to prey on small food businesses and trick them into signing expensive year-long contracts with extremely confusing language, aggressive follow-up practices (virtually harass the person every day until they block us or sign), and push them to memberships they cannot afford. Once the person was in nothing mattered. Sewage spilling from the ceiling onto your prep tables? Sucks. Freezer broke and your product is ruined? Oops! Then the accelerator, the real scheme of them all. First, we were to find people with relatively any packaged food idea and make them create LLCs to sign over 10% immediately with literally no monetary contribution on our end. To put things in perspective it costs around 100k to get a CPG business running. We gave them nothing yet took 10%. The end goal was to get these new business owners in the commercial kitchens to buy extremely expensive memberships they could not afford. The benefits of the program were non-existent and only pertained to about 1% of all accelerator members. After you go through this cycle a couple of times you start to feel gross about yourself. So, you start to push back. This is where things went south. The entire marketing/sales team was laid off in January 2023 for an undisclosed reason. There were differing viewpoints between executives and marketing for a while, but this is normal in a workplace. Not for Union Kitchen, though. If you read other reviews, it is repeated that they only reward yes-men. I cannot stress this enough. If you find yourself working for them, just play the game. They are extremely fragile people and view opposing opinions as a direct attack. I am not that person, sadly, so I was chastised. I knew my layoff was coming a month before it happened through gossip planted by a team lead. I would go into the corporate office, a warehouse with one conference room, feeling the whispers of my coworkers burn into my skin. Finally, after I had been on unpaid bereavement, my entire team was let go. Unbeknownst to us, every single person on the corporate side, besides two, played an intricate part in the dissipation of our team through rumors, name calling, and silence. We were not missing quota, we were not underperforming, and we were not neglecting our clients. We did not support their immoral conquest. In classic UK fashion, they tried to sneak an NDA in the pathetic severance package. They will do everything in their power to be as embarrassing as possible.