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Delivering culinary quality at scale

For International Chefs Day, Steven Snook, Head of Product, Business Performance at ISS Australia, reflects on a career that began close to the source and now centres on delivering culinary quality across complex food services.
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International Chefs Day 2026

Quality starts with the setting

Long before the Michelin-starred kitchens, there were Sunday roasts at Steven Snook’s grandparents’ house. “It doesn’t matter how big your house is. Everyone always congregates in the kitchen,” he says.

That belief stayed with him through a career that began in a working farm kitchen and included nine years with the Gordon Ramsay restaurant group. Today, he applies that experience to complex, high-volume food services.

His role at ISS is not to recreate a Michelin-starred restaurant in another setting, but to carry forward the discipline behind it: care with ingredients, an exacting standard and attention to the consumer.
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Great food ideas have to survive service

Steven looks widely for inspiration. “I enjoy seeing what other people create,” he says. Ideas may come from a restaurant, a site chef or ISS food teams overseas, but each one is tested against local conditions.

Can the ingredients be supplied reliably? Will the dish suit the equipment on site and retain its quality at volume? Above all, does it make sense for the people being served

Steven’s experience helps him recognise an idea’s potential and where it may fail. Creativity still matters, but the food has to work once service begins.
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A high standard shared by many hands

For Steven, strong culinary leadership means creating a standard that the whole team can carry – not one that depends on the person who designed the menu being in the kitchen.

Steven describes this part of his role as testing and developing recipes, then making sure site teams have what they need to deliver them. He also spends time on site “helping upskill the chefs”. Testing recipes where they will be served allows chefs to adapt them for local production. Feedback from service can inform later menus, giving teams a genuine role in improving the food.
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Exploring food with purpose

Steven’s respect for ingredients began in the farm kitchen, where he learnt about the full life cycle of food. An early lesson about avoiding waste stayed with him: “That education lived with me forever,” he says.

That understanding supports seasonal choices and more thoughtful use of food, keeping responsibility connected to quality.

It also connects Steven’s work with Lauren Bowen, ISS Pacific Head of Nutrition and Dietetics. Lauren brings the evidence about what people need; Steven helps turn it into meals people will choose and kitchens can deliver.
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The 2026 International Chefs Day theme, Food Explorers, reflects this approach. For Steven, exploration is less about novelty than judgement – understanding an ingredient well enough to know where it belongs and what it can offer the people being served.

For clients, the effect reaches well beyond the kitchen. It is felt when a familiar meal brings comfort to a worker spending weeks away from home, or when thoughtful food improves a hospital patient’s experience. Steven’s craft lies in helping ISS teams deliver those moments consistently.
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