Explore by Career/Production
Food Cooking Machine Operators and Tenders
Operate or tend cooking equipment, such as steam cooking vats, deep fry cookers, pressure cookers, kettles, and boilers, to prepare food products.
- Median pay
- $40,550
- per year
- 10-year outlook
- +0.6%
- Stable
- Typical entry
- High school diploma or equivalent
Key skills
- Operations Monitoring
- Reading Comprehension
- Monitoring
- Operation and Control
- Active Listening
- Critical Thinking
- Coordination
- Complex Problem Solving
What they do
- Clean, wash, and sterilize equipment and cooking area, using water hoses, cleaning or sterilizing solutions, or rinses.
- Read work orders, recipes, or formulas to determine cooking times and temperatures, and ingredient specifications.
- Observe gauges, dials, and product characteristics, and adjust controls to maintain appropriate temperature, pressure, and flow of ingredients.
- Measure or weigh ingredients, using scales or measuring containers.
- Tend or operate and control equipment, such as kettles, cookers, vats and tanks, and boilers, to cook ingredients or prepare products for further processing.
- Record production and test data, such as processing steps, temperature and steam readings, cooking time, batches processed, and test results.
- Set temperature, pressure, and time controls, and start conveyers, machines, or pumps.
- Remove cooked material or products from equipment.
- Collect and examine product samples during production to test them for quality, color, content, consistency, viscosity, acidity, or specific gravity.
- Pour, dump, or load prescribed quantities of ingredients or products into cooking equipment, manually or using a hoist.
Majors that lead here
No mapped majors yet.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (OEWS, Employment Projections) and O*NET, used under CC BY 4.0.