What’s Growing On (Part One): A Look at Three Corporate Kitchen Gardens

Written by Elizabeth Sullivan on May 9, 2012in Featured, Gardening, Local food - 0 Comments

At Bon Appétit, we love local food — just ask the thousand-plus small farmers, fishers, and artisans who supply us through our Farm to Fork program. Inspired by them, teams at many of our corporate accounts have started growing some of their own food. (At our education accounts, students have usually taken the lead and started productive farms from which we gladly buy.) These corporate “kitchen gardens” not only provide ultra-fresh herbs and other produce, but also give us the opportunity to educate our guests about importance of local and sustainable food — and the hard work that goes into growing it.

No Bon Appétit Management Company account is alike, and that’s true for the gardens as well. Some are traditional raised beds with drip-irrigation systems, others are creative solutions to tight space constraints. What they plant is driven by the chefs’ research into what grows well in their regions, what their guests like, and what might be able to replace items that aren’t sourced locally. While most of these corporate gardens just supplement our produce deliveries, our chefs know how to stretch what they pick to share the bounty with as many guests as possible – such as taking a couple dozen pounds of zucchini to make zucchini bread or using lettuce from the garden in a chef’s special salad.

Here’s the first installment of a series spotlighting kitchen gardens at our corporate accounts across the country: Continue…

More in