Bon Appétit Management Company

On Tuesday, September 24, all of our 500-plus cafés will offer a 100% local meal — everything from oils to grains to spices and sweeteners must be sourced from within 150 miles. The only foreigner allowed is salt. Some locations get a little loco and offer a 100% local menu — multiple all-local dishes!

Today the Food Recovery Network, a student run organization dedicated to recovering leftover food from college campuses to give to those in need, will be rolling out the newest resource for their organizing toolkit: A Guide to Food Recovery for Chefs and Managers (PDF). Bon Appétit Management Company is proud to have partnered with FRN to create this resource, which is specifically designed to help campus dining services at schools around the country — not just Bon Appétit ones — work with students to launch food recovery programs.

Bon Appétit General Manager Katie McKenna opened the doors to the Carleton East dining hall, where local middle school students embarked on a from-scratch pizza adventure taught by Sous Chef Gibson Price. The class included a fair amount of dough throwing (the approved kind) but also more serious topics, including tours of the full-scale industrial kitchen, a visit to the bakers (who offered delicious granola bars), and fruitful conversations about college life.

During the summer, Washington University’s student-run farm, The Burning Kumquat, grows much more than just fruits and vegetables. At Camp Kumquat, now in its third year, a new crop of young gardeners is ripening.

Editor’s Note: Midwest Fellow S.K. Piper’s two-year stint has come to an end, and we are happy to announce that she will be remaining with Bon Appétit Management Company as our sustainability manager at Denison University. Please welcome the new BAMCO Foundation Midwest Fellow and the BAMCO blog’s newest contributor, Alyse Festenstein!

At Bon Appétit, we like not only fresh produce but fresh cafés, too. At University of Redlands in Redlands, CA, it was time to remodel both cafés and student spending plans — tastefully, of course.

As a food service company, one of the joys of working directly with college students is helping to instill a healthy eating mindset in young people who are living independently for the first time. But reaching kids at even younger ages can be helpful in preventing bad habits from really taking hold.

If asked, few people might say turnips were on their Top 10 list, but mash them like potatoes with butter and milk, and what guest would turn them down? And many shy away from other lesser-known vegetables for fear of the unknown or lack of cooking knowledge, but chefs — especially lovers of local and seasonal — live for showing off many underserved vegetables and highlighting their best qualities.

The Art Institute of Chicago hosts hundreds of high-profile events throughout the year, but one of the hottest tickets this spring was the inaugural Chef ’s Playground benefit for the Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC).

Bon Appétit teams love playing a role in the communities in which we work, but supporting cooking related enterprises isn’t one we get to fill that often. That’s why the Bon Appétiters at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia enjoy their partnership with the Dorrance H. Hamilton Center for Culinary Enterprises (CCE) so much.