Bon Appétit Management Company

The Bon Appétit team at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) has long made fighting waste a top priority, whether it’s finding streamlining purchasing practices to reduce kitchen waste, coming up with creative ways to decrease overall waste, or fueling a fleet of trucks on used fryer oil.

Of course Bravo readers know just how important food recovery and reduction of food waste is to Bon Appétit’s core values. So imagine how tickled Executive Chef/General Manager Ron Stewart of RS5 Café was to form a partnership with a farm that will let Bon Appétit feed the farm’s animals as well as its fields.

Bon Appétit is enacting waste reduction initiatives companywide — and while the leadership role is comfortable, making the action a partnership feels even more agreeable. Bon Appétit at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL, partnered with student government to promote going trayless.

Watch out California, there’s a new “green” college in town — one you might not have encountered! At Marymount California University in Los Angeles (formerly known as Marymount College), Bon Appétit General Manager Donna Novotney and Executive Chef Luis Jimenez have worked closely with the college’s sustainability officer, Kathleen Talbot, to tackle waste in the dining hall head on. In one semester they’ve gone trayless, phased out Styrofoam to-go containers, successfully implemented a reusable to-go container program, started a student garden, and launched a living herb wall!

Today the Food Recovery Network, a student run organization dedicated to recovering leftover food from college campuses to give to those in need, will be rolling out the newest resource for their organizing toolkit: A Guide to Food Recovery for Chefs and Managers (PDF). Bon Appétit Management Company is proud to have partnered with FRN to create this resource, which is specifically designed to help campus dining services at schools around the country — not just Bon Appétit ones — work with students to launch food recovery programs.

The Bon Appétit Fellows are gearing up for the start of the school year and thanks to our partnership with the Food Recovery Network (FRN) we have some exciting new programs to look forward to.

At a special event at Catersource headquarters’ test kitchen in Minneapolis, Bon Appétit Management Company chefs and staff shared the new Stem to Root program as part of a series showcasing new, inspiring catering and culinary trends.

When our chefs at Reed and Lewis & Clark Colleges first sat down with Ava Mikolavich from Urban Gleaners to discuss a food recovery program they were skeptical of how much food they could actually donate. Yet since April, the two cafés have donated a total of more than 5,000 pounds of food!

Still, as Dani Turk from the hunger relief organization Food Life Line once said, “Though it may seem like nothing, one piece of lasagna is still a dinner for a person in need.” So in April, the two schools began donating leftover food that would otherwise go to waste to Urban Gleaners.

This burger made of millet and edamame is a nutritious and planet-friendly alternative to ground beef. Using carrot peels as a topping also helps to avoid unnecessary food waste.

It’s not easy being green, as a certain frog once sang, and it’s even less easy getting your practices certified green. But that’s exactly the feat that BonAppétit at VMware in Palo Alto, CA, accomplished in February, when it became a Bay Area Certified Green Business.