Just over two decades ago, Bon Appétit Management Company began our annual tradition of challenging our chefs to cook an entire meal made exclusively with ingredients grown within 150 miles of their café. The rules are simple: All elements of the meal must be grown, harvested, milled, raised, or produced locally — the only exception is salt.
From Our Blog
Re-Launching Our Internal Food Recovery Guide
We’re proud to introduce our new Internal Food Recovery Guide, a practical resource created to help our general managers and chefs nationwide launch and sustain impactful food recovery programs.
Introducing Buen Provecho, a Cookbook for Hispanic Heritage Month
We’re thrilled to mark Hispanic Heritage Month with something truly special: the release of Buen Provecho, a digital cookbook made entirely by members of our culinary teams across the country who proudly identify as Hispanic or Latinx.
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Leading By Example
Bon Appétit Management Company is an on-site restaurant company offering full food-service management to corporations, universities, museums, and other specialty venues. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we operate more than 1,000 cafés in 33 states. Our chefs cook from scratch, including sauces, stocks, and soups. Widely recognized as a pioneer in environmentally sound sourcing policies, we are proud to be the first food service company to:
Directly support small, local farms- Strive to serve only sustainable seafood
- Address antibiotics overuse in our meat supply
- Switch to cage-free eggs, both shell and precracked/liquid
- Tackle food’s role in climate change
- Advocate for farmworkers’ rights
- Commit to pork raised without gestation crates
- Switch to third-party verified humanely raised ground beef
Timeline
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Last year, our Regional Sustainability Coordinator Elise Dudley brought the University of ...
Last year, our Regional Sustainability Coordinator Elise Dudley brought the University of Pennsylvania Eco-Reps on a field trip to Bennett Compost to showcase what happens to food scraps produced by @PennDining.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Penn Dining's plan to achieve "near zero-waste" status, amongst other sustainability commitments. A recent article by The Daily Pennsylvanian (link in our bio!) laid out all the details:
➡️ They're piloting a near-zero waste program at Quaker Kitchen and plan to expand it to all other facilities in the future, depending on the success of the plan.
➡️ The Eco Reps are helping Bon Appétit teams collect data on food waste to help develop other creative solutions.
➡️ Penn Dining has refined its Green2Go program to increase their container return rate, saving 6,588 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions since its inception.
➡️ According to Waste Not, 92% of food waste was sent to be composted at a local facility operated by Bennett Compost in Northeast Philadelphia, with 7% sent to a landfill and 1% to food recovery.
#LoveBonAppetit
Our latest issue of Bravo is here! 🙌 For Fall 2025, we focused on the creativity and ingenuity of...
Our latest issue of Bravo is here! 🙌 For Fall 2025, we focused on the creativity and ingenuity of our teams. Swipe through the carousel to preview the solutions issue and comment “Solutions Issue” to get it right in your DMs!
1️⃣ The DIAC in Action, on page 18, highlights the creative solutions we're implementing to increase equity and inclusion at Bon Appétit. Bon Appétit’s Diversity and Inclusion Action Council (or DIAC) is our behind-the-scenes bridge builder! With 5 committees dedicated to disrupting bias embedded in our corporate structure ranging from ESL to Hourly and Salaried Development, the DIAC is poised to act thanks to their diverse range of voices from across the company.
2️⃣ On page 28, Office Optional, Hospitality Required highlights how Bon Appétit teams have been meeting the hybrid moment of “return to office” in many ways. 👨💼 From shifting strategies to address daily, inconsistent changes in population to making new partnerships with greater impact, the focus has always been delivering a nimble, people-first, and imaginative food program.
3️⃣ Finally, we announce the winner of our Earth Day Cover Crop Recipe Challenge in Cover Crops: Serving up Soil Superheroes for Earth Day! 🌎 For Earth Day 2024, Bon Appétit teams across the country challenged themselves to cook with foods that are grown as cover crops in our first ever Cover Crop Recipe Challenge. Although one recipe stood out amongst the rest, all our teams proudly dug in to address the concerning global issue of soil degradation! Check out the winning recipe on page 44.
#LoveBonAppetit
Santa Clara University went behind the scenes of one of @scudining's cafés to shine a spotlight on a bedrock of the SCU community: Emma Peña-Gallardo, a Bon Appétit employee of 27 years!
She shared the following to SCU about her time working there (adapted):
"I love it when the students come back to school every fall quarter. The energy around here is back to 100%, and it's very different from summer when campus is so quiet. When I'm at the Mission Bakery in Benson, I see a lot of kids walking back and forth. It’s noisy, in a good way. Everybody looks happy to be here.
A lot of people at Santa Clara know who I am because I always say hi to our customers. I like to talk with the students a lot—about their families, where they come from. Many students come from another country and it’s nice hearing about their lives before they arrived here. They always visit me with a smile, and that makes me happy. It makes me feel like I do a good job.
I like to take care of people. At Santa Clara, I feel like I’m taking care of the students and faculty and visitors. I make them great cappuccinos. That’s my favorite drink to make."
#HumansOfBAMCO #LoveBonAppetit
Most Recent News
‘Eat Local Challenge’ lunch tasks Emerson’s chefs with crafting a nearly 100% locally sourced menu
On Tuesday, Sept. 23, chefs at the Dining Center were tasked with crafting the entire lunch menu using only ingredients sourced within a 150-mile radius as a part of the “Eat Local Challenge.”
Inside Penn Dining’s plan to achieve ‘near-zero waste,’ improve sustainability
Penn Dining, the University’s on-campus food service department, and Bon Appétit, the catering company that partners with Penn, are taking steps to adopt sustainable practices and embrace environmentally friendly policies.
How Bon Appétit is building a culture around food education
From 2020 to 2024, Bon Appétit Management Company impacted more than 138,000 guests with its food education programs, including 3,000 children in Healthy Kids cooking classes, 1,500 student athletes learning about performance nutrition, and 1,000 chefs learning about plant-forward cooking.
Join Us
We’re always looking for great people to join our teams! If you:
- Get excited when fresh, local produce arrives on your loading dock
- Enjoy creating all-new dishes from scratch
- Love interacting with people through delicious and nutritious food
- Thrive when part of a close-knit team that takes your and others’ safety seriously
- Enjoy helping people reach their full potential, nourishing them through at-work learning opportunities
Then you may be a fit for us!