Union Kitchen Reviews

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.

There are a myriad of concerning factors of this company so let’s get into it. If you do end up getting an offer and are interested in accepting, do not settle for the entry level salary. They’ll tell you that everyone starts at level one (currently 40K), but if you’re in the right place at the right time and they’re desperate enough, they’ll get you started at $60K, which is still far behind industry standard (though they'll tell you it's industry leading pay!). If you do start with the entry level pay, be prepared to watch store employees rise through the ranks way faster than you, regardless of how qualified you are (or likely overqualified). Yes, the store is a more lucrative job, even despite the fact that they eliminated tipping (search “union kitchen union” for more on wage theft). Be wary of asking for a raise really ever, despite performing well and getting good feedback. I witnessed this firsthand with colleagues being held back after asking for more money. They preach growth mindset but expect the biggest fixed mindset from management if you question the status quo. They will target you for talking back. If you don’t sing the praises of their leadership trainings and workshops, your loyalty will be questioned. Loyalty is everything and you’ll quickly notice who’s in the club and who is not. They are comically cheap. We would have all team meetings with 10 people and a budget of $50 dollars for lunch. Just don't offer to provide it if you can't feed people. I witnessed countless toxic management dynamics and lack of professionalism - lots of yelling and short fuses, weird outside of work dynamics as upper management hangs out outside of work, including weekly tennis appts with the CEO. If you’re not in with the in crowd, the dynamics can be really challenging and unprofessional and will certainly give you some PTSD. Much of leadership has only had one job (at Union Kitchen) and it shows. Inappropriate and discriminatory commentary around the office like a quote from a member of leadership about his staff using expletives and the R word. I experienced several racist/classist comments from a member of leadership like getting the two Asian prospective members names mixed up and how if you have a yahoo email address you probably won’t pay your bills. The turnover is crazy, likely due to the below industry average wages, lack of benefits, four holidays, the length of time it takes for you to accrue even a single day of PTO (spoiler: it's at least 4 months), fickle decision-making from leadership, moving targets, or countless other reasons. Be ready for a whole new group of coworkers if you stay longer than a year. Their mission is to build successful food businesses, yet in practice, this is only the case when convenient for UK. There’s a LOT of member bashing and it’s a difficult pill to swallow if you actually care about seeing members succeed. There will be commentary around the office about members who didn’t take UK’s advice and it’s not UK’s problem if they go out of business. Yes, a lot of startups don’t succeed, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that UK doesn’t really offer much in the realm of investment, connection, or even helpful advice after a member has launched their product. In their commercial kitchen where there is a mix of food entrepreneurs (food manufacturers, ghost kitchens, caterers, etc.), the membership pricing is pretty premium for the space and benefits. Because of this and other reasons, the company was having issues with a lot of member turnover (i.e. the sales numbers were low). Leadership would literally discuss how they can fine members to make more money and they would make their staff walk the kitchen floor to find a certain number of members to fine. Leadership talked about how they needed to make at least $5K in fines monthly. Each fine was $50, so they wanted 100 fines per month for their membership base of 45-55. To add to this, members are often at the mercy of UK services, like distribution. While this is initially presented as a huge benefit, members have to navigate obstacles that are absolutely detrimental to their success, including but not limited to thawed frozen product (consider the fact that these new businesses have one shot at a new customer – would you repurchase a freezer burned ice cream or dumpling?), missed drop offs at retailers resulting in business owners having to drop off their product to the stores to make up for UK’s mistakes, and so many other challenges. The classic UK response is finger pointing because, of course, why take accountability when you can blame a member or teammate? The main takeaway is that Union Kitchen is extremely unethical, toxic, and a good old boys (and one woman) club. They have no interest in diverse opinions or new ideas.