Bon Appétit Management Company

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.

Bon Appétit Management Company is proud to partner with its education clients to tackle many mutually important issues of sustainability, such as food waste and climate change. Now, with the graduation of the first recipient of a joint scholarship at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, it has added greater access to higher education to the list.

Through their Farm to Fork purchases, Goucher College Resident District Manager Norman Zwagil and his team are supporting positive change in the tides of agriculture in the Chesapeake Bay region — and one such purchasing relationship is with Big City Farms, a half-acre of greenhouses right in the middle of Baltimore, built on top of an old parking lot .

You can take the boy out of the kitchen, but you can’t take the kitchen out of the boy.

This Saturday, February 16, join thousands of “foodies,” “farmies,” and leaders in food and farming in watching the TEDxManhattan: Changing the Way We Eat conference. Bon Appétit is very honored that Maisie Greenawalt, our vice president of strategy, was selected to present. During the third session, Empower, which starts at 4pm EST, Maisie will speak frankly about “How the Humane Sausage Gets Made” — how a large corporation like Bon Appétit decides to tackle animal welfare issues, and what specific challenges we face in meeting our aggressive deadline of 2015 to end all purchases of pork raised without gestation crates.