Blog: Farm to Fork

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Bon Appétit is proud to offer our congratulations to our Farm to Fork partners Melissa and Aaron Miller of Miller Livestock on being the first Food Alliance certified livestock farm in Ohio. The Millers raise grassfed beef and lamb, pastured pork, chickens and turkeys, and laying hens on 168 acres in Kinsman, Ohio — about 70 miles from Cleveland. Bon Appétit Dining Services at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland has long been buying the Millers’ pork, and the past year bought half of their hogs. On February 21, Bon Appétit announced a groundbreaking commitment to improving animal welfare practices. Part of that promise is to buy even more humanely raised meat from folks like the Millers who have taken the trouble to have their practices verified by a third party. That’s why our team at Case Western has encouraged the Millers […]

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Students at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, are already well-versed about the importance of sourcing food locally, but it’s not often they get to actually visit one of the farms that supplies the café and see first-hand what it means to run a family farm.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Larga Vista Ranch in Boone, Colorado along with some of the Bon Appétit team from Colorado College. Doug Wiley, who owns Larga Vista Ranch along with his wife Kim, is one of those passionate, charismatic people that I could listen to all day. A fourth-generation farmer working land that has been in his family for 95 years, he is well versed in everything from the benefits of raw milk to climate change and food safety.

Located in the heart of ranching country, Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, is proud to support the work of grass-based ranchers like Cheryl and Robert Cosner of Upper Dry Creek Ranch.

At the crack of dawn one Saturday morning, a group of Gallaudet University students visited Even’ Star Organic Farm, a longtime Farm to Fork partner of Bon Appétit Management Company, to learn about where exactly their food comes from.

The young farmers movement and interest in campus farms is blooming, and with them, inquiries about campus farms are steadily flowing to my inbox. This information is meant for sharing­ – for inspiration, ideas, and contacts. So here’s yet another amazing campus farm to know about: Zena Farm in Salem, OR.

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.

The words “free range” conjure up many different images in people’s minds, the most idyllic of which includes luscious fields as far as the eye can see without any fencing to dilute the monotony of green. Unfortunately, the phrase isn’t regulated, so it more often gets slapped on chicken raised by the tens of thousands in a hangar-sized shed. But truly free range does exist — and it’s the lifestyle enjoyed by chickens on Larry Schultz Organic Farm in Owatonna, MN. Larry is one of Bon Appétit’s 1,000-plus Farm to Fork partners, supplying organic chicken to St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN.