Bon Appétit Management Company

Three years ago, I was getting ready to graduate from college with a major in anthropology, which everyone swore was a death sentence for a job search.

I remember clearly the serendipitous meeting that landed me with the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation. Through a series of extremely random events, I attended a presentation by Bon Appétit CEO and founder Fedele Bauccio, Vice President Maisie Greenawalt, and Foundation Director Helene York. In that one hour, I learned more about the problems of our food system than I had in my entire college career — and that’s despite the fact that I had long been interested in sustainability issues and had even spent time living with organic coffee farmers in Mexico. These three corporate executives talked about things like rBGH, reduced antibiotics in animal husbandry, and sustainable seafood [BAP1] — some issues I had never even heard of. I was blown away.

We serve great food, and the story behind that food has as much to do with the people cooking and serving it as it does the farmers who grew it.

Since I moved to Seattle a year and a half ago, there’s no farm whose name has come up more than Quillisascut, located in the foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains in Rice, WA. And since I visit farms as Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s West Coast Fellow, I have lots of conversations about food and farming. Quillisascut is a cheese company, selling what they call “traditional farmstead cheese from the pampered pets of Pleasant Valley,” but it’s also a school for the domestic arts. After completing a five-day “Introduction to Farming” workshop at Quillisascut recently, nicely documented by Farmgirl Gourmet, I understand why this farm school is so beloved by food service professionals, healthcare students, farmers and aspiring farmers, vacationers, and other “co-producers” (as Slow Food and the farm’s cookbook, Chefs on the Farm refer to us “eaters”). Attendees from […]

The question is: How do you connect large volume needs of the University with the very small volume output of most Midwestern family farms? Bon Appétit at Washington University recently hosted a farmer’s meeting, inviting over 35 farmers from Illinois and Missouri, to tackle exactly this question.

For Joe and Joyce Malley, albacore tuna fishing is more than an occupation or a sport – it’s a lifelong love affair. And one they pursue thoughtfully.

From foodies to vegans and the gluten-intolerant, today’s students are increasingly scrutinizing the food at their prospective colleges — and citing its quality and choice as major factors in their decision making. But comparing dining programs can be tough, without tasting food at each school and chatting with the dining services staff. The Daily Meal sought to make the process easier by pulling together a list of the nation’s top 20 colleges and universities, ranked by their food options. Four Bon Appétit accounts made the top 10!

When you’re outside of a company looking in, it’s hard to tell if the sustainability claims it makes are genuine. A year ago, I accepted a position with Bon Appétit Management Company in operations because it was one of a small handful of companies that seemed to be making significant efforts within a constrained food system. I was interested in sustainable business throughout graduate school, and what I heard over and over (and over!) again was: get some experience in operations. If you understand how a factory works or a kitchen runs, you’ll be more valuable to any sustainability team.

Last week, two elderly farmworkers took the brave and very unusual step of suing their employer, an onion grower in the Coachella Valley, for violating the few labor laws that protect farmworkers. California is one of the few states that require farmworkers to be paid the minimum wage. Farmworkers are exempt from many federal labor laws. These gaps were detailed in the Inventory of Farmworker Issues and Protections in the United States. We’ve created a new, educational slideshow based on key facts and statistics from the Inventory for educational purposes.

Last week Bon Appétit Management Company cafés around the country celebrated 13th Annual National Farmworker Awareness Week (NFAW). As part of our efforts to make people think about who harvests their food, we asked students at colleges and universities to create a collage about why they support farmworker rights. Here’s how some thoughtful students from American University in Washington, DC; Goucher College in Maryland; and Emmanuel College in Boston finished this sentence: I support farmworker rights because…

Pizza is the No. 1 food among college students. What better way to get them cooking than teaching them how to make their own perfect pies? At Carleton College, Bon Appétit Sous Chef Gibson Price and the FireBellies student cooking club partnered up to practice DIY pizza making — from the dough to the sauce. Andrew Yang, class of 2015, joined them to document the culinary adventure.