Snapchef trains, transports and employs chefs while filling needs of Massachusetts kitchens

SPRINGFIELD -- If chicken soup cures everything, the chicken soup simmering at Snapchef on Worthington Street in Springfield just might be part of the cure for Springfield's persistent workforce problems.

The culinary training program is helping people who need jobs but lack skills -- or formal proof that they have skills -- as well as employers who have jobs to fill but can't find a qualified candidate.

"We are not your typical employment agency," said Todd Snopkowski, founder and CEO of Snapchef. "We are not your typical job training agency. We combine the two."

He founded the company 15 years ago after a career running commercial kitchens for Aramark and Cisco.

Snapchef, which came to Springfield in April, offers free classes to aspiring kitchen workers -- how to ensure sanitary conditions and how to properly use a knife, for example -- and places those people in kitchens where they can use their training in jobs that pay $11 to $20 an hour.

In 2017 alone, Snapchef trained 13,000 people with jobs in Massachusetts' culinary industry.

Snapchef offers temporary placement, permanent placement and executive level placement to help restaurant kitchens fill decision-making rolls.

Also different about Snapchef: That soup simmering away as a lesson will end up as a meal for the trainees or for them to take home to their families.

"We make sure that people have food to take home to their families," Snoplowski said. "We are in the food business. No one should be hungry and no one's family should be hungry."

Transportation is free for Snapchef workers. The company has  fleet of vans -- both here and at its locations in Boston, Worcester and Providence -- so that the kitchen workers it hires can get rides to where they are needed for work or training.

In some ways, Snapchef acts as any other temporary employment agency. A commercial kitchen in need of help contracts with Snapchef to fill the jobs and pays Snapchef. Snapchef then pays the workers every week.

Or, sometimes a kitchen will hire Snapchef to find staffers that it will hire outright.

Sometimes Snapchef workers gather at an office and ride together to a job site. Sometimes, especially early in the morning, the Snapchef van picks up workers either at their homes or at a central pick-up site and takes them to the job site. The driver is almost always one of the culinary workers assigned to the location.

"We realized that in Boston, the T stops at midnight. But our people don't get off work until 1 or 2 a.m.," Snopkowski said. "If our people are working a breakfast shift someplace, they need to be there early and there won't be transportation at that time."

In Springfield, that means a van gets workers from city neighborhoods to jobs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst or Foxwoods casino in Connecticut.

Snapchef until now has offered short-term training over just a few days. This month, a dozen trainees started a new 150-hour, 10-week training program paid for through a federal apprenticeship program.

"So far, we are in our fifth week," Snopkowski said. "And they are all working full-time. It's great."

The Regional Employment Board of Hampden County announced the $225,000 apprenticeship grant a few weeks ago. It's part of a $1.5 million statewide grant, said David Cruise, CEO of the Regional Employment Board. The goal is to get 75 people in the Snapchef program over three years.

Potential apprentices are recruited through area job centers, CareerPoint in Holyoke and FutureWorks in Springfield. Snapchef also recruits online at snapchef.com/becoming-a-snapchef and at its headquarters on Bridge Street.

Apprenticeships are a favorite tool of the Trump administration, Cruise said. And this one works the same way as the familiar apprenticeship programs in the building trades that lead to someone becoming a union journeyman.

The same $1.5 million grant is paying for other programs in diesel engine repair and precision manufacturing.

The apprenticeship is simply more education than Snapchef provides in its regular five-day course. In an apprenticeship model, the trainee works 2,000 hours a year -- that's 50 40-hour weeks -- and gets 150 hours of related technical instruction.

The Employment Board's job is to pay for that technical instruction.

"The goal is to encourage employers to hire these people and get them trained," Cruise said.

Another goal is to build a pool of trained workers. That's the need that brought Snopkowski to Springfield.

"We are preparing for MGM Springfield," Snopkowski said. "We are also preparing for the vacuum effect."

By "vacuum effect," Snopkowski means the impact of MGM Springfield hiring all the skilled culinary workers it needs -- in some cases hiring people from other kitchens who then have to back fill and hire new workers to take those jobs.

MGM needs to hire 800 workers for its food service operation. That's more than a quarter of the total 3,000 permanent jobs at MGM Springfield.

Those 800 restaurant workers will come from someplace, Snopkowski said. And some might come from the kitchens and dish rooms of existing restaurants, hospitals and college cafeterias. Managers all over the Pioneer Valley will have to back fill those jobs.

At the training kitchen on Worthington Street, Ken Desmarais, director of culinary business development, explained how all early-stage trainees -- whether in the apprenticeship program or just getting a quick five-day course -- get a ServSafe  kitchen hygiene certificate very quickly.

"That's their ticket into any kitchen," he said. "And they take that with them."

New trainees fill out a questionnaire, which quizzes them on restaurant operations. They also take a knife test. It's looks easy: peel and dice a potato and a few carrots.

"But we are watching everything they do," Desmarais said. "Do they chop down, or do they slice through? Speed comes with experience. If they are slow and not very accurate in the cuts, then we know they don't have very much experience."

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