CEO Fedele Bauccio Receives IACP’s Lifetime Achievement Award

Food service pioneer lauded for his extraordinary contributions to America’s culinary landscape

Palo Alto, CA (April 3, 2012)— Bon Appétit Management Company is proud to announce that the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has given CEO and founder Fedele Bauccio its Lifetime Achievement Award, for revolutionizing the food service industry. In 1987 Fedele began hiring real chefs to cook real food from scratch for his new company’s corporate and university diners. In the 25 years since then, Bauccio’s initial focus on flavor has become a quest to use Bon Appétit’s purchasing power to transform the supply chain into a more sustainable model — one that values small, local farmers; humane animal treatment; farmworker welfare; and more.

iacp_lifetime achievement award_bauccio_cafebooth“We have always been about great food, so it’s gratifying to be recognized by an organization whose members include our best chefs, writers, teachers, and food industry professionals,” said Fedele. “A Lifetime Achievement Award, however, sounds like you’re finished with what you set out to accomplish. We are not finished. We’ve changed contract food services, but we have so much more to do when it comes to America’s food system.”

IACP’s Lifetime Achievement Award is reserved for individuals whose lifetime careers are in the culinary arts, and who have made noteworthy and lasting contributions to the culinary world. Past honorees include such notables as Martin Yan, Chuck Williams, Judith Jones, and Jacques Pépin. The award is the latest in a recentstring Bauccio has collected for his pioneering efforts, including a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, the Chefs Collaborative Sustainability Pathfinder Award, and the Cruz Reynoso-Ralph Abascal Don Quixote Award from California Rural Legal Assistance (for his work to advance farmworker justice).

“With his 25-year track record of bridging the gap between offering sustainably sourced, cutting-edge foods, and the requirements of operating in a high-volume arena, Fedele has made a lasting impact on how we think about food,” said Cynthia Nims, president of the Board of Directors of IACP. “He has proved that it’s possible to offer fresh, seasonal, local, and sustainably sourced foods in corporate and university dining rooms.”

Bon Appétit has changed the way Americans all over the country eat, both at work and at school. Menus are chef-driven — no companywide recipe kits or menu cycles — and utilize local, seasonal produce. Cooked-to-order stations feature authentic dishes from Korean bulgogi to Indian tandoori. A DIY ethos pervades the kitchens, with many chefs making their own yogurt, artisanal breads, charcuterie, and preserves in addition to the mandatory stocks and sauces. The company consistently racks up top honors for campus food. Most recently, in 2011 the Princeton Review named Bon Appétit’s team at Wheaton College #1 in Best College Food. And out of the top 10 Best College Food campuses chosen by Newsweek and The Daily Beast in 2011, numbers 1, 2, and 4-6 were Bon Appétit accounts.

Over the past 25 years, Bauccio has committed to and instituted dozens of groundbreaking environmental and socially responsible sourcing practices, well ahead of others in the industry. In 1999, before “buy local” was adopted as the mantra of forward-thinking chefs everywhere, Bauccio launched Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program, requiring chefs to source at least 20 percent of their ingredients from small farms within 150 miles of their kitchens. The commitments that followed include sustainable seafood (2002), rBGH-free milk (2003), cage-free shell eggs (2005), the Low Carbon Diet (2007, which tackled food’s role in climate change), farmworker rights (2009), and more. Most recently, in February 2012, Bon Appétit announced the industry’s most comprehensive animal welfare policy to date, committing to phase out all pork produced in gestation crate systems and source all liquid eggs from cage-free systems (as it already does for whole eggs) by 2015.

The IACP award was presented on April 2 in New York City in a ceremony held at the new Times Center Theater, hosted by Mo Rocca from the Cooking Channel’s Food(ography) and correspondent for TheCBS Morning Show.

About Bon Appétit Management Company

Bon Appétit Management Company (www.bamco.com) is an on-site restaurant company offering full food-service management to corporations, universities, and specialty venues. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Bon Appétit has more than 400 cafés in 31 states, including eBay, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Getty Center. A pioneer in environmentally sound sourcing policies, Bon Appétit has developed programs addressing local purchasing, the overuse of antibiotics, sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, the connection between food and climate change, and, most recently, farmworker welfare. The company has received numerous awards for its work from organizations such as the James Beard Foundation, Chefs Collaborative, Natural Resources Defense Council, Seafood Choices Alliance, The Humane Society of the United States, and Food Alliance. Its dining operations at Wheaton College in Illinois were voted Best College Food by 122,000 college students surveyed by the Princeton Review in 2011.

About IACP

Founded in 1978, The International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) has been connecting culinary professionals with the people, places and knowledge and they need to succeed. First coming together as a small but determined group of cooking school owners and instructors, IACP – then known as the Association of Cooking Schools (ACS) – now boasts some 3,000 members from more than 32 countries and serves as the leading forum for culinary professionals from all backgrounds. The only culinary organization of its kind: IACP is a crossroads where everyone can meet to share experiences and expertise, in ways that lead to unparalleled growth and learning.

Contact: Bonnie Azab Powell, [email protected], (650) 621-0871