There’s a version of this article that never sees daylight.
It lives in late-night lock-ins after service, when the extractor’s finally off, someone opens a cheap bottle of red, and the senior lads and lasses say what they actually think about running a kitchen in Britain right now.
Not the PR version. The real one. Why no one stays. Why the good ones go. Why do you look at an old team photo from five years ago and realise only you and the pastry section are still standing?
I’ve had those conversations more times than I can count. Different towns, different styles of cooking, independents and groups. Same themes, over and over.
And the awkward bit is this: the numbers now match the anecdotes.
Start with the basic churn.
A major UK skills body looking specifically at chefs estimates labour turnover among chefs at about 40%, with around 20% leaving the profession altogether. That works out to almost 19,000 chefs leaving the industry each year, while the remaining 75,000 are effectively “churned” between jobs.
A recruitment report drawing on a British Hospitality Association survey suggests around 10% of chef positions are vacant across UK hospitality, higher still in London and other big cities.
Step back to look at the whole sector, and you see the same pattern. Analysis of employee data across UK industries puts hospitality at the top of the high-turnover league table, with staff churn over 50% in accommodation and food services, compared with a UK average nearer a third.
On top of that, industry bodies reckon there are well over 100,000 vacancies in hospitality, tens of thousands above pre-pandemic levels, with sustained shortages in kitchen roles specifically.
You can dress that up however you like. In plain English it means:
And that’s before you talk about how people actually feel.
A mental health survey by The Burnt Chef Project found around 80% of hospitality workers had experienced mental health issues related to their job, and only about a third would actively recommend working in hospitality to others.
Another piece of research from the same project describes our old “suffer in silence” routine as a supposed badge of honour: long hours, no daylight, a “work hard, play hard” culture, and very patchy support.
Meanwhile, a survey reported by Hospitality Action found nearly half of respondents rated their work-life balance as poor, and many described burnout as simply “part of the job”. ”.
Add in a report from a major foodservice supplier: more than half of chefs surveyed smoke, nearly half drink to cope with stress, and over a quarter report using drugs, with illegal use mentioned most often in the UK.
We can argue about exact percentages if you like, but the shape of the thing is obvious: this is not an industry people are retiring from in droves with a gold watch and a healthy liver.
Older chefs will tell you, “Kids these days don’t want to graft.” It’s a comforting story. Puts all the blame on the new generation, none on us.
The data and a bit of honest memory say otherwise.
Pre-Brexit, a huge chunk of UK kitchen brigades came from Europe. After freedom of movement disappeared and visa rules tightened, that tap was turned right down. One recent analysis of Home Office figures found that chefs had actually become the single most common occupation for UK skilled worker visas, overtaking software developers, which tells you how acute the shortage has become.
At the same time, training pipelines have been creaking. A chef shortage report by People 1st notes that while there were over 28,000 chef students in a single academic year, projections suggested the industry needed only about 11,000 additional chefs over five years. The problem is that many never make it into, or stay in, real kitchens: roughly one in five chefs are leaving the profession entirely.
So it’s not just “we can’t find them”. It’s “we can’t keep the ones we’ve got, and we’re burning through the ones in training ”.
For my generation, being a chef was your identity. You sacrificed weekends, relationships, and family events, and you got told that made you serious. Young chefs now look at that bargain and say, quite sensibly, “No, thank you.”
The Burnt Chef data, and similar surveys, show a clear shift: people still love food, creativity and service, but they expect the job to support a life, not consume it entirely.
We can moan about that, or we can accept that if we want to keep talent, 70-hour weeks and heroic suffering probably aren’t the selling points we think they are.
Pandemic closures did something interesting. They pushed chefs into other work: warehouses, delivery firms, office canteens, you name it. A lot of them discovered:
Plenty never came back. A 2024 recruitment report points out that many chefs in their twenties and thirties used the disruption to move into more stable sectors and didn’t return to professional kitchens.
We didn’t just lose bodies. We lost a chunk of our future sous-chefs and head chefs.
If you read the yacht article and winced in recognition, this is why.
The modern head chef role looks like this:
If you’re in a group, add endless reporting and head office targets. If you’re independent, add landlord negotiations and utility bills.
A recent insight report using data from more than 35,000 hospitality employees, by Pineapple and workforce platform Sona, found overall team turnover in hospitality had dropped from 75% to 67% in a year – still brutally high. Crucially, it showed that sites with stable, internally promoted head chefs and managers had significantly lower churn across the whole team.
In other words, stability at the top is the closest thing we have to a retention lever.
The trouble is that top job has quietly become almost impossible. You are accountable for everything, but crucial decisions on staffing levels, pay, opening hours and discount schemes are often made by someone who only sees the P&L.
It’s the same pattern the yacht captains described: responsibility without equivalent control.
When you sit down with operators, most of them are not villains. They’re under pressure too: business rates, energy costs, food inflation, fickle customers.
The problem is how information gets filtered.
Head chef:
“We can’t do this menu, at these prices, with this rota, without breaking people.”
Area manager or GM, upwards:
“The team are under pressure but coping. We might need some tweaks.”
Head office to owner/investors:
“Labour’s a bit tight, but we’re on track.”
By the time that message finishes its journey, the urgency has evaporated. The staff survey turns up another “we’re short-staffed and burnt out” signal, but because turnover is high everywhere, it gets filed under “new normal”.
Data doesn’t entirely help. When industry reports calmly state that around 30–50% turnover is “standard” for hospitality, depending on whose figures you read, a lot of mediocre operators read that as an excuse rather than a warning light.
The people closest to the heat – the chefs and kitchen porters – have the clearest view of what’s breaking. They also tend to have the least say in how the business is run.
If you want to understand why so little changes, look at who pays the price for speaking freely.
Hospitality is a small village. Start talking publicly about abusive behaviour, impossible rotas or dangerous conditions, and there’s always that quiet threat: “You don’t want to be seen as trouble.”
The Burnt Chef material talks explicitly about this: “suffering in silence” as a warped badge of pride and a culture where mental health issues are everywhere but rarely acknowledged in policy or practice.
At the same time, confidential surveys show four out of five hospitality workers experiencing mental health problems linked to their job.
If we’re being brutally honest, it suits some businesses that the only people who truly understand the damage are the ones with the most to lose by saying anything.
Owners will groan about recruitment fees and agency bills, but most don’t put a proper number on it.
One recent financial guide aimed at hospitality operators reckons that replacing a single employee in the UK costs six to nine months of their salary, once you factor in recruitment, training, lost productivity and the knock-on hit to service.
Now do a back-of-the-napkin exercise on a small restaurant:
By the time you’ve cycled through half your team in a year, you’ve effectively set fire to a good chunk of your wage bill in hidden costs.
From that angle, investing in retention looks cheap.
None of this is unsolvable. Some places are already doing far better than the averages. They tend to have a few things in common, and the numbers back them up.
The Pineapple/Sona work shows a clear link between internal promotions into head chef and other leadership roles and lower staff churn overall. Head chef internal promotion rates in their sample rose from 44% to 51%, and sites with more “home-grown” leaders saw significantly better retention.
In plain terms: if your sous-chef can see a real path to running the kitchen one day – with training, support and a sensible step-up – they’re more likely to stick around. The same goes for CDPs eyeing a sous-chef position.
Token titles without pay, training or authority do not count. Commis in a jacket that says “Junior Sous” are not fooled.
We don’t need to import yacht “rotation” wholesale, but we do need to stop pretending that permanent doubles and six-day weeks are a mark of pride.
The better operators I see:
When you join that up with the mental health data – half the industry reporting poor work/life balance, huge levels of stress and burnout – it’s obvious that this is not a “nice to have”. ”.
Given that 80% figure, pretending this is a niche issue is ridiculous.
The places making progress do a few simple but unfashionable things:
It is not about scented candles and yoga in the cellar. It is about not chewing people up and spitting them out.
There is a nasty habit of selling a role as “creative, supportive, family atmosphere” and then handing people a menu written by a sadist and a rota written by a computer.
Given that we now have decent public benchmarks for vacancy rates, turnover and mental health, there’s no excuse for this bait-and-switch.
If you can’t offer saintly conditions, at least be truthful:
People will choose hard work if they trust you.
One of the clearest points from the chef shortage research is the “vicious circle of longer hours and re-engineering operations” as businesses stretch fewer chefs over the same or bigger offer.
There’s a simple, brutal rule of thumb: if you can’t staff it, don’t serve it.
Better to do 15 dishes brilliantly with a sane team than 35 badly with a brigade on the edge. Your guests, your reviews and your staff retention will all be healthier.
I don’t think one article, or one set of statistics, magically fixes UK kitchen turnover. But I do think we have run out of excuses not to talk about it honestly.
We now know, in black and white, that:
That is not a “snowflake generation” problem. That is a structural problem.
If you own, run or influence a kitchen in this country, the question is blunt:
Do you want to keep rebuilding the brigade every year, or do you want a place people stay long enough to get really good?
If it’s the latter, the path is fairly clear. Smaller menus. Better rotas. Honest recruitment. Real progression. Leaders who are taught how to lead, not just how to plate.
None of that is glamorous. It won’t get you many likes on social media. But it might mean that, next time someone takes a photo of the team, you’ll actually recognise most of the faces five years down the line.
And for an industry that supposedly lives on “hospitality”, that seems a modest ambition.
Chef Ian McAndrew’s specialist eBooks and guides are available directly on ChefYesChef, including his technical titles and autobiography. If you want more practical, chef-led reading beyond this article, you’ll find the full collection here.
Chef Ian McAndrew works with chefs, businesses, and individuals on a wide range of culinary projects, from concept development to practical problem-solving.
If you’d like to talk through an idea or need informed guidance, you’re welcome to contact him.
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