Featured Image: Leadership Team

Leadership Team

 

FEDELE BAUCCIO

Bon Appetit CEO Fedele BauccioChief Executive Officer and Cofounder

Fedele Bauccio cofounded Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides food service to 1,000-plus cafés located at corporations, universities, and museums in 33 states, in 1987. Together Fedele and Bon Appétit have revolutionized the food service industry, both by introducing fresh, made-from-scratch food to the contract market and by pioneering environmentally and socially responsible practices designed to create a more sustainable food system. From the beginning, Bon Appétit has been committed to the health of its customers, striving for the freshest ingredients and banning unhealthy ingredients such as MSG and trans fats. The launch of our Farm to Fork program in 1999 marked the first of our many commitments to widening that focus to the communities in which we operate, and to the planet itself. Bon Appétit is the first food service company to commit to serving only seafood that meets Seafood Watch sustainability guidelines (since 2002), to reducing antibiotic use in farm animals (2003); to switching to rBGH-free milk (2003), cage-free shell eggs (2005), humanely raised ground beef (2012), and gestation-crate- free pork (2016); tackling food’s role in climate change (2007), and to addressing farmworker rights (2009). Fedele’s work has been honored by many nonprofit and industry groups. Notably, he has received the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2014 National Retail and Consumer Products Award, for redefining the food service industry and pioneering environmental and local sourcing policies, and one of the James Beard Foundation’s inaugural Leadership Awards, along with First Lady Michelle Obama and eight others. From 2006-2008, he served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. He is currently a board member of Compass Group North America. Fedele graduated from the University of Portland with a master’s degree in business administration in 1966 and a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1964. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Portland, the University of Redlands, and Notre Dame de Namur University.  [Extended bio >]

m_bauccio-7673_4x6cropMICHAEL BAUCCIO

President

With more than four decades of leadership in the food service industry, Michael Bauccio is the blueprint of operational excellence. He began his food service career in 1971 with Saga Corporation’s Education Division, and in 1988 launched Bon Appétit’s Education Division. Bon Appétit revolutionized university dining with a new model that brought in professional chefs to cook delicious food entirely from scratch. Following the success of the educational division, Michael took over operation of all Bon Appétit’s business divisions — education, corporate, and specialty restaurants and museums. He continues to drive change and innovation at the unit level, while also directing support personnel in marketing, culinary development, recruiting, and finance. Thanks in part to the outstanding customer-focused operations team that Michael has methodically built, Bon Appétit has been recognized as the industry leader for premier onsite restaurant quality food, coupled with an industry-best 99% client retention rate. Michael’s unwavering commitment to our people and his insistence on maintaining attentive and personal relationships with clients have been integral to our success.Michael has been involved with the President’s Institute, Council of Independent Colleges, for many years. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from California State University, Northridge. [Extended bio >]

baldwin-7755_4x6cropLIZ BALDWIN

Chief Administrative Officer 

Liz Baldwin has been part of the Bon Appétit story from the beginning; in fact, before the beginning: she was an officer of the original Bon Appétit Catering Company, which CEO Fedele Bauccio purchased in 1987 and relaunched as an onsite food service provider, Bon Appétit Management Company. Liz is our most senior employee, the primary financial steward of the company and a keeper of much of the corporate lore and history. Many of her team have been with the company for more than a decade, some since they were student workers in college. Prior to joining Bon Appétit, Liz spent several years in banking, serving in management roles in operations as well as commercial lending. Today, Liz directs our business in the areas of finance, accounting, human resources, information systems, payroll, audit and administration. Balancing the needs of our clientele and operations teams while maintaining our compliance in an ever-increasing regulatory environment remain Liz’s primary responsibilities and her central focus. In keeping with the company’s ongoing commitment to the community, Liz has served on the advisory board of La Cocina, a small incubator for Latino food-service entrepreneurs; the Board of Directors of Servo Dynamics, Inc.; and the Community Advisory Board of the Everest Charter High School. She is involved with Slow Money, which helps people/companies invest in food and farms in their local communities. In 2009 she was honored by the San Francisco Aids Emergency Fund as its “Person of the Year.” Liz graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a B.A. in English and additional studies in economics and accounting at University of California, Berkeley.

Maisie Ganzler by a window
MAISIE GANZLER

Strategic Advisor

Maisie Ganzler is a strategic advisor for Bon Appétit Management Company and the author of “You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime,” a book that chronicles the work of multiple brands recognized for their sustainability leadership, including Bon Appétit. She transitioned to an advisory role after a 30-year tenure at the company where she was instrumental in shaping the overall strategic direction for Bon Appétit as Chief Strategy and Brand Officer. She remains connected to the company while also holding independent board roles and pursuing other projects. In 1999, Maisie helped develop the Farm to Fork program, a groundbreaking companywide initiative to buy locally, and has since helped create and launch many of Bon Appétit’s other progressive initiatives, among them reducing antibiotics use in poultry in 2002, launching the Eat Local Challenge and switching to cage-free shell eggs in 2005, phasing out gestation crates for pork in 2012, and introducing the Imperfectly Delicious Produce program in 2014. In 2015, Maisie oversaw the company’s shift from a Low Carbon Diet to its ongoing Low Carbon Lifestyle, as well as the launch of the Food Standards Dashboard. More recently, she has focused on antibiotics in agriculture, slavery in the seafood supply chain, and on farmworkers’ rights. She serves on the boards of the Equitable Food Initiative, the Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, Food System 6 Accelerator, Food What?, and Juma Ventures. She was named a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence in 2012. Maisie graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. [Extended bio >]