Vice President, Strategy
President, Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation
[Download high-resolution photos here]
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 co-founder and 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 develop Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program,
a groundbreaking companywide initiative to buy locally. Since the
program’s inception, Bon Appétit chefs around the country have spent
tens of millions of dollars on food grown by small farms within 150
miles of their kitchens, creating positive changes in countless local
food economies.
Maisie
has led the teams that launched 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 a
full 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 cafés
are transformed into “low carbon learning venues” for the day. The
first Low Carbon Diet Day in 2008 marked the beginning of Bon Appétit’s
customer education campaign around the climate impact of food choice,
and the launch of the Low Carbon Diet Calculator, an interactive Web-based tool where consumers can assess their own "foodprints."
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: Bon Appétit now buys only turkey and
chicken raised without the routine use of non-therapeutic antibiotics
and serves only natural beef burgers. 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 focusing on farmworker rights. After a trip
to Immokalee Florida to meet with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
(CIW) and to see firsthand the difficult working conditions of tomato
pickers in that region, Maisie and CEO Fedele Bauccio collaborated with
the CIW to usher in a sweeping Code of Conduct
for how our Florida tomato suppliers treat their workers. 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: they have met
with farmers around the country to assess overall sustainability,
including their labor practices in agricultural operations that supply
Bon Appétit kitchens. Under Maisie's oversight, the Fellows worked with
United Farm Workers (with help from Oxfam America) to compile the Inventory of Farmworker Rights and Protections in the United States, a comprehensive report about current laws and practices. Maisie was also instrumental in bringing to life TEDxFruitvale, a special conference focused on farmworkers, which she co-organized and hosted on October 14, 2011.
Maisie is on the board of Food Alliance,
North America's most comprehensive third-party certification for the
production, processing, and distribution of sustainable food and on the board of the Equitable Food Initiative, a new integrated labor standards project led by
United Farm Workers, Pesticide Action Network, and the Consumer
Federation of America. A graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel
Administration, Maisie previously worked on behalf of a number of
national food brands and ran a hospitality training company.
Maisie contributes opinion pieces to national outlets regularly and is a frequent speaker and interviewee.