Bon Appétit Management Company

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.

With such student organizations as Farm Club, a brand-new cooking student organization headed by young Swedish chef Vayu Maini Rekdal, and Food Truth, considered the most active group on campus, it’s no wonder Carleton College students flocked to compete in the campus’s first annual Sustainable Iron Chef Competition, hosted by Bon Appétit Management Company in honor of the first national annual Food Day. Cooked up by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day is a movement for “real food” across the country.

In certain circles, some farmers are as famous as rock stars. Bon Appétit Farm to Fork partner Al Courchesne of Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood, CA, is one of them. Renowned Berkeley, CA, restaurateur Alice Waters has been known to serve his O’Henry peaches, Rainier cherries, Goldensweet apricots, and Warren pears unadorned for dessert at Chez Panisse. To learn why, I organized a tour of Al’s farm along with a group of 50 faculty members, staff, students, and Bon Appétit Sous Chef Cheylin Hale from Mills College in Oakland, CA.

For a special fundraiser for the Seattle Art Museum on Friday, November 4, Bon Appétit’s TASTE Restaurant team worked with internationally renowned chef Mario Batali. Projected to raise $300,000 for the Seattle Art Museum, this extraordinary epicurean event featured a family-style dinner with Batali as well as a panel discussion among Batali; Thierry Rautureau, The Chef in the Hat™; and Steve Pool of KOMO News. Guests enjoyed signature Batali dinner platters, hors d’oeuvres, and desserts. TASTE’s menu was designed to bring Batali back to the Northwest, where he grew up, drawing ingredients from farms close by.

  How local can you go — food wise? That was the challenge taken up by dozens of Bon Appétit Management Company chefs in 31 states for the seventh annual Eat Local Challenge on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. Some cooked a meal from 99.9% local ingredients, with salt as the only allowable non-local ingredient. A few went 100% local — meaning they even foraged for salt from within 150 miles of the café. Others focused on serving one excellent local meal. The reasons to source local ingredients are simple but important if you care about sustainability: it tastes better, is more nutritious, encourages biodiversity, preserves open space, and protects the environment, just to name a few. The companywide Farm to Fork program has helped Bon Appétit accounts learn about what’s available in their area throughout the year, and how to use […]

The University of Pennsylvania is now in the midst of its third annual Food Week, sponsored by Bon Appétit at Penn Dining. This annual celebration covers a variety of topics — from local food, to food justice, to nutrition — and is a collaborative effort among students, faculty, local community activists and farmers, and Fox Leadership at Penn. Here are some highlights of last year’s Food Week, including a Food Justice Banquet in the form of a four-course meal (catered by Bon Appétit of course) and a panel on agriculture featuring several of our Farm to Fork partners: