Director of Strategic Sourcing and Research, Bon Appétit Management Company
Director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation
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Helene is responsible for overseeing and managing purchasing initiatives for Bon Appétit Management Company. Her responsibilities include sourcing new products; managing supply chains, reporting, and supplier relations for the company’s Farm to Fork program and other initiatives.
In April 2007, Helene created and launched the company’s Low Carbon Diet program. The goal of the program was to raise awareness of the connection between the food system and climate change, and to reduce emissions associated with Bon Appétit’s food service operations by 25% over five years in the highest impact areas. Thus far, the program has met our goals, achieving reductions by approximately 5 million pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions each month through menu changes, food waste reduction, and energy efficiency improvements in our kitchens.
Helene has been instrumental in shifting corporate purchasing away from threatened fish species and toward sustainably sourced supplies. Her most recent effort toward this goal was developing and launching Bon Appétit’s Fish to Fork purchasing program in 2011, which encourages promotes the use of fresh, seasonal seafood from non-industrial regional sources.
As director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, Helene principally synthesizes and disseminates research. The Foundation’s mission is to educate chefs and consumers about how their food choices affect the global environment. This position, which is principally that of a teacher, allows Helene to blend her passions for great food, resource conservation, and scientific integrity and deploy them on a national scale through implementation of Bon Appétit’s various sustainability initiatives and the monthly companywide educational webcast series.
Helene has served as an adviser on several technical panels, including the Global Aquaculture Project Initiative (sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust) and the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops (initiated by Natural Resources Defense Council to develop standards to improve the way food is grown). She was a founding board member of the nonprofit FishChoice.com, which provides an online resource for chefs to locate sustainable seafood supplies. In 2010 she was named a Seafood Champion by Seafood Choices Alliance for her steadfast commitment to sustainable seafood on a global level. She is currently a director of Humane Farm Animal Care.
A frequent guest lecturer at universities across the country on the subject of the food system’s relationship to climate change, she has spoken at the national conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Nobel Peace Prize Forum in the United States. Since 2009 she has been a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly online. Helene earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard and a master’s degree at Yale.