Bon Appétit Management Company

Bon Appétit celebrated Valentine’s Day last week at American University in Washington, DC, by hosting an event that focused on the best part of this holiday: Chocolate! But not just any old chocolate.

Today — and not for the first time — Bon Appétit Management Company is making history in the food service industry. In a joint announcement with The Humane Society of the United States, we are vowing to stop serving all pork produced using the cruel and inhumane practice of gestation crates and all eggs, including “liquid” ones (those removed from their shells), from hens confined to battery cages by 2015.

You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”Well, a few students at Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, CA, got lemons and went way beyond lemonade to create desserts, sandwiches, salads, and more.

What’s in our food? Most Americans think we have a right to know — and that means not just calories, salt, fat, and preservatives, but genetically engineered ingredients such as corn and soy. The Bon Appétit Management Company has joined forces with more than 450 consumer, healthcare, environmental and farming organizations, manufacturers, retailers for the Just Label It campaign, which is calling on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to label GE foods. Last week Just Label It released a new video, directed by Robbie Kenner of “Food, Inc.” and designed to persuade consumers to tell the FDA they agree.

For Jewish college students following a kosher diet, meal times on campus can be daunting – unless they attend Washington University in St. Louis, MO, or Goucher College, in Baltimore, MD. These universities were ranked Nos. 1 and 3 by College Prowler as offering the best kosher dining options, and since College Prowler’s rankings are created “for students, by students,” prospective students can trust that these schools have got them covered.

The community of Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, is a competitive one. For the campus’s second Chopped! competition, contestants had to create a meal in only 30 minutes from a basket of surprise ingredients — with a sustainable twist: they were mostly local.

Every year, as our holiday thank-you to our clients, the Bon Appétit Management Company makes a donation on their behalf to a food-related nonprofit. Last year, it was Wholesome Wave, which helps bring healthful, locally grown fruits and vegetables to low-income families. This year’s partner is the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, which assists recent military veterans in using their many relevant skills to become a new generation of young farmers. We chose the Farmer-Veteran Coalition because it is working to fill two very urgent needs. At the end of this month, all American troops will have been withdrawn from Iraq. They and other U.S. military veterans are returning home to an already tough job market, and as NPR recently reported, they often have a tougher time finding employment than civilians. And although you won’t see ads on Craigslist for farmers, America has […]

At Bon Appétit Management Company, we take a lot of pride in our Farm to Fork program, in which we purchase fresh, local food from small farmers around the country. As part of its second annual Food Week, the University of Pennsylvania hosted a “Farmville Forum”: during this panel, Farm to Fork Partner* Trent Hendricks of Hendricks Farm and Dairy spoke quite frankly about his relationship with Bon Appétit and what it meant for his business: Transcript:

The final event of last spring’s Your Food Chain series at Santa Clara University ended with the theme of strawberries. I had the honor of speaking alongside strawberry farmer Irma Mendoza. When Irma was 17, she left Mexico for the United States and naturally sought out a farm job. She started out harvesting strawberries, but her experiences growing in California were different from growing up in Mexico. The biggest difference being that the berries were grown with extremely toxic pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

Most people — regardless of how you feel personally about transgenic, or genetically engineered (GE), foods — would agree that we all have a right to make informed choices. Polls show that the majority of Americans (some surveys say up to 90%) believe foods containing GE ingredients should be labeled as such, and Bon Appétit agrees.