Maisie Greenawalt joined Bon Appétit Management Company in 1994 and has since been instrumental in shaping the company’s overall strategic direction. Maisie oversees Bon Appétit’s culinary development and purchasing policy efforts, and leads Bon Appétit’s marketing and communications initiatives. Additionally, Maisie is president of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, whose mission is to educate people about how their food choices affect the global environment and local economies.
In 1999, Maisie helped to develop the Farm to Fork program, a groundbreaking company-wide initiative to buy locally. Maisie works with chefs around the country to create positive changes in the local food economy by sourcing and using seasonal and regional ingredients from within a 150-mile radius of each café. Since the program’s inception, Bon Appétit has spent tens of millions of dollars on local food, thereby supporting local farmers and their surrounding communities.
Maisie has been the primary architect of a number of Bon Appétit’s equally progressive sustainable initiatives. In 2003, Maisie created Bon Appétit’s Circle of Responsibility program to educate chefs and café guests on how their food choices impact their environment, community and personal well being. Maisie also initiated Bon Appétit’s progressive Eat Local Challenge in 2005, in which Bon Appétit challenged its chefs to serve meals for one entire day consisting entirely of locally sourced food. The Eat Local Challenge is now an annual event that chefs and café guests alike look forward to every year.
Maisie also conceptualized Low Carbon Diet Day, in which all Bon Appétit café’s are transformed into “low carbon learning venues” for the day. The first ever Low Carbon Diet Day in 2008 marked the beginning of Bon Appétit’s customer education campaign around the carbon impact of food choice, and the launch of the Low Carbon Diet Calculator, an interactive web-based tool where consumers can assess the carbon impact of their food choices.
In addition to developing sustainable initiatives for cafés nationwide, Maisie also takes a leadership role in setting food procurement policies for Bon Appétit as a whole. She worked alongside the Environmental Defense Fund in 2002 to issue a far reaching company policy on the use of antibiotics in farm animals, and since that time, Bon Appétit only buys turkey breast and chicken raised without the routine use of non-therapeutic antibiotics. Also, after learning about inhumane battery cage operations in 2005, Maisie drove the policy changes behind Bon Appétit’s decision to buy only Certified Humane and cage-free shell eggs.
Most recently, Maisie has been navigating the sometimes murky waters surrounding farm worker rights. After a trip to Immokalee Florida to meet with the CIW (Coalition of Immokalee Workers) and to see firsthand the difficult working conditions of tomato pickers in that region, Maisie collaborated with CEO Fedele Bauccio to usher in a sweeping code of conduct for the company’s tomato suppliers as it relates to farm worker rights. Maisie realized the need to explore what Bon Appétit’s role could be in facilitating fair labor practices throughout their entire supply chain, and so created the Bon Appétit Fellows program. Maisie manages the fellows’ work in the area of labor as they meet with farmers around the country to assess overall sustainability, including their labor practices in agricultural operations that supply Bon Appétit kitchens.
Maisie graduated from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. In previous roles, Maisie worked on behalf of a number of national food brands and ran a hospitality training company.
