Bon Appétit Management Company

Explore the world of misunderstood vegetables this May! This month’s Well Being Challenge encourages you to try a vegetable you are not familiar with one time per week, whether in a Bon Appétit Cafe or at home. To get started, try the below recipe for a stir frycontaining pea shoots, which are only available in the spring so be sure to act quickly. To learn more about misunderstood vegetables, visit cafebonappetit.com.

Recently I met two very different Farm to Fork suppliers for Bon Appétit accounts in North Carolina — about as different as you’d expect a fish distributor and a beef rancher to be. Yet they had one key thing in common that made partnerships with our teams work.

Since I moved to Seattle a year and a half ago, there’s no farm whose name has come up more than Quillisascut, located in the foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains in Rice, WA. And since I visit farms as Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s West Coast Fellow, I have lots of conversations about food and farming. Quillisascut is a cheese company, selling what they call “traditional farmstead cheese from the pampered pets of Pleasant Valley,” but it’s also a school for the domestic arts. After completing a five-day “Introduction to Farming” workshop at Quillisascut recently, nicely documented by Farmgirl Gourmet, I understand why this farm school is so beloved by food service professionals, healthcare students, farmers and aspiring farmers, vacationers, and other “co-producers” (as Slow Food and the farm’s cookbook, Chefs on the Farm refer to us “eaters”). Attendees from […]

What better way to celebrate this month’s Well Being Challenge, which invites you to explore the world of misunderstood vegetables than with fennel? To learn more about the misunderstood vegetables, visit cafebonappetit.com

Fennel Bulb and Frond Gratin

At Bon Appétit, we love local food — just ask the thousand-plus small farmers, fishers, and artisans who supply us through our Farm to Fork program. Inspired by them, teams at many of our corporate accounts have started growing some of their own food. These “kitchen gardens” not only provide ultra-fresh herbs and other produce, but also give us the opportunity to educate our guests about importance of local and sustainable food — and the hard work that goes into growing it. Here’s a look at “what’s growing on” at eBay, Target, and SAP!

The question is: How do you connect large volume needs of the University with the very small volume output of most Midwestern family farms? Bon Appétit at Washington University recently hosted a farmer’s meeting, inviting over 35 farmers from Illinois and Missouri, to tackle exactly this question.

For Joe and Joyce Malley, albacore tuna fishing is more than an occupation or a sport – it’s a lifelong love affair. And one they pursue thoughtfully.

This month’s Well Being Challenge invites you to explore what you’ve been missing by trying a vegetable you are not familiar with one time per week, whether in a Bon Appétit Cafe or at home. To get started, try the below recipe for a salad containing rhubarb, a lovely misunderstood vegetable worth exploring. To learn more about misunderstood vegetables, visit cafebonappetit.com.

As soon as we arrived at Country Roots Farm in Pueblo, CO, I knew this was going to be an interesting visit. Lying around were so many creative gadgets and yard decorations made from repurposed materials that I half expected Doc from Back to the Future to appear in Carhartts wielding a pitchfork.

When we Fellows visit college campuses to host educational events, we love going behind the kitchen doors and meeting the hardworking people who make Bon Appétit Management Company great. Here, I’d like to introduce you to Debra Swenson, lead cook at East Hall at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. Debra has been with Bon Appétit since we opened Carleton four years ago, but she’s been working in food service at Carleton for 32 years.