News

Jon Fortt takes an inside look at the catering world of Silicon Valley's hottest player.

Today Bon Appétit Management Company announced its agreement with the Exploratorium, in partnership with acclaimed San Francisco chef Loretta Keller, to create seasonal and sustainable fare at the museum’s new Pier 15 site on the Embarcadero at Green Street, when it relocates in 2013. Under Ms. Keller’s direction, the award-winning, Palo Alto–based food service group will procure and prepare all of the food for the new museum site, including the sidewalk café on the west side of the pier off the Embarcadero and the waterfront café on the east side, in the all-glass Bay Observatory Building.

The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal has included Maisie Greenawalt on its annual Women of Influence list, recognizing 100 female executives who are making significant change in their industries and their communities. An advocate for sustainability in the food system in general and farmworker rights in particular, Maisie joins heroines of technology, banking, healthcare, and more.

From the Getty Center in Los Angeles to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, diners at Bon Appétit Management Company cafés around the nation will notice quite a few menu changes on Thursday, April 19, Bon Appétit’s fifth annual Low Carbon Diet Day. However, responsible food sourcing is just part of Bon Appétit’s ongoing Low Carbon Diet strategy to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our food service operations. Go behind the kitchen doors, and you’ll find a lot more than lightbulb swapping under way to meet our goal of reducing our energy and water usage by 25%.

The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has given CEO and founder Fedele Bauccio its Lifetime Achievement Award, for revolutionizing the food service industry. In 1987 Fedele began hiring real chefs to cook real food from scratch for his new company’s corporate and university diners. In the 25 years since then, Bauccio’s initial focus on flavor has become a quest to use Bon Appétit’s purchasing power to transform the supply chain into a more sustainable model — one that values small, local farmers; humane animal treatment; farmworker welfare; and more.

Bon Appétit Management Company hopes it has grown large enough to demand change from the ranchers and farmers it buys from.

"CEO Fedele Bauccio often doesn't get credit outside the industry for being a trailblazer. But let me tell you: His impact on the local-sustainable movement is big.…"

it’s refreshing to see that Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO) has promised to phase out pork produced in gestation crates, do away with all eggs from confined hens, and source at least 25 percent of their meat from farms that are third-party-certified humane by 2015.