What should a line cook put on a resume?
By Olive Jobs · Updated September 3, 2026 · 4 min read
Written for biotech jobs, a line cook's résumé is a sanitation-and-procedure record: a food handler card, the temperature logs you signed, and recipes run to spec at volume. Each entry names the station you held alone and the covers per service you handled there. The boundary is the menu: dishes, plating, and cuisine go.
The kitchen records a biotech production floor also keeps
A regulated production floor runs on written procedures, signed logs, and materials weighed to a spec, and a working kitchen produces all three under other names. Your recipe card is a work instruction. Your cooler and hot-hold temperature log is a record you signed the moment you took the reading. Your food handler card is a hygiene certificate with an expiry date, and it's the first credential a production supervisor can check.
Lead with the card. State the food handler or ServSafe card, the issuer as printed on it, and the expiry directly under your name. A line cook rarely holds another certificate, and it's doing the work a license does on other people's résumés.
List the logs you owned rather than the ones that existed: temperature checks at open and close, cooling logs for stocks and braises, date labels on every container, and the allergen board. Scale work goes in too. Say what you weighed by portion and to what tolerance the chef de cuisine held you.
A rush on the grill, written as biotech production work
A station bullet on a kitchen résumé says what you cooked and how busy it got. A production bullet says what procedure you ran, at what volume, and what record proves it. Keep the verb on the procedure, use covers per service as the volume, and end on the log or checklist that captured the shift. The dish name goes. A biotech reader can't use it.
On a kitchen résumé the bullet says: "Worked the grill station at a high-volume steakhouse, Friday and Saturday service." Rewritten for a production posting, the same shift reads: "Ran the grill station alone through weekend services, cooked every protein to the house's written temperature spec, and signed the hot-hold and cooling logs each shift." Add the covers per service from your last house after the word services, and there's nothing left in the bullet that needs a kitchen to make sense.
A prep list you owned is a daily production schedule with quantities, so the bullet says how many items were on it and what you did when a delivery came in short. Expediting converts the same way. If you called tickets and timed the pass, you coordinated a line, and you can say so.
Cutting the menu from a line cook's biotech résumé
The menu is the first cut: dish names, the cuisine, plating, and knife skills describe output a biotech reader doesn't buy, so they go. Kitchen names stay, but each gets the covers per service beside it, because a production supervisor doesn't know your house and needs its volume.
Titles aren't a translation problem so much as an absence problem. There is no director or principal rung on a line; seniority is which station you held and how often you expedited, so a biotech grade has nothing to map onto. Name the station and the responsibility instead of reaching for a title: "sauté, closing shifts, expedited on the sous chef's nights off" says more than "lead cook" and can be checked.
The temperature log is the one kitchen record that reads as production documentation without translation, so it stays in every entry where you signed it. It can't stand in for plant training you haven't had, though: don't claim cleanroom, gowning, or batch-record experience you picked up from reading a posting. State the kitchen records and stop there.
The record test, and where the move to biotech gets explained
The reason you're leaving the line for a production floor belongs in the cover letter, and nowhere on the résumé. The résumé's job is to show records, so each bullet has to end on something a supervisor could pull: a log, a card with an expiry, a count, or a written spec. A bullet that ends on a dish or an adjective is still a kitchen bullet.
The recruiter screen runs the record test out loud. Expect questions about what a log looked like, who checked it, and what happened when a reading was out of range, and keep only the bullets you can answer that way. You've kept those records for a living, so the résumé only has to say so. Ordering and length questions are answered in Resume Questions, Answered, and where a posting states its own format rule, the posting wins.
Read each bullet, name the record it ends on, and cut any bullet where you can't; the résumé is done when every entry left standing could be checked by a call to your last chef de cuisine.