Manager Onboard Culinary Programs
Position Summary:
The Manager Onboard Culinary Programs serves as JetBlue’s strategic culinary lead and primary point of contact for all catering business partners across the system, ensuring food quality, operational consistency, and brand alignment across onboard dining programs. This role combines strategic program leadership with hands-on culinary oversight to drive menu specification accuracy, food safety compliance, pricing alignment, and partner performance across JetBlue’s global catering network.
Reporting to the Senior Manager Onboard Experience Product Development, the Manager owns the end-to-end lifecycle of culinary programs, from menu specification and business partner onboarding through compliance monitoring and performance optimization. The role establishes scalable processes and project management systems that enable the team to work efficiently, supporting JetBlue’s growth while protecting the high-quality dining experience that sets the brand apart.
The Manager also acts as JetBlue’s culinary subject matter expert in RFP processes, cross-functional initiatives, and new business partner negotiations, ensuring requirements are clearly defined and successfully executed. This position requires strong culinary literacy, operational discipline, and the ability to build sustainable systems that balance food quality, cost, and crew execution, with a leadership style that demonstrates JetBlue’s values of Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun.
Essential Responsibilities:
- Lead the Onboard Culinary Programs team, setting clear priorities, workflows, and expectations to deliver safe, reliable, and brand-aligned Onboard dining programs
- Own menu specifications and recipes within Product Development, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and timely release to Catering Standards, Catering Operations, Catering Business Partners and all other stakeholders as required
- Create and maintain crew guides that outline plating, portioning, and service procedures. Partner with Inflight Service Delivery to confirm guides can be executed inflight, and with Catering Standards to ensure pack plans align with galley realities
- Serve as JetBlue’s primary culinary point of contact for all catering partners across the system, managing relationships across menu specifications, food quality, food safety, pricing, and performance
- Oversee JetBlue’s onboard food safety and compliance framework
- Own audit cadence, corrective actions, incident response, and Audit program maintenance, ensuring standards are met across the network
- Create and manage high-level dashboards, so crewleader and leadership can quickly ascertain the health and performance of our fresh food catering network
- Ensure proposed dish pricing from caterers are within budget, and manage accordingly to deliver financial goals
- Act as culinary and food safety subject matter expert for RFPs and SLAs, ensuring all culinary and food safety requirements are captured, clearly defined, and executable
- Lead onboarding of new culinary partners with the Onboard Experience Product Development team, translating concepts into workable onboard culinary programs
- Align menu changes with budget targets and collaborate with Finance and catering partners to ensure accurate pricing and cost control
- Build scalable systems, calendars, and change-control routines to improve accuracy, communication, and visibility across teams
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Catering Standards, Catering Ops, Service Delivery, Compliance, Finance, and, as needed, Brand, Marketing, Social, and Corporate Communications to deliver programs that work end-to-end
- Represent the Culinary Programs team in cross-functional meetings, ensuring culinary requirements are embedded into decisions and outcomes
- Provide leadership, guidance, and development for a team of analysts, fostering accountability, process discipline, and continuous improvement
- Other duties as assigned
