Just over two decades ago, Bon Appétit Management Company began our annual tradition of challenging our chefs to cook an entire meal made exclusively with ingredients grown within 150 miles of their café. The rules are simple: All elements of the meal must be grown, harvested, milled, raised, or produced locally — the only exception is salt.
From Our Blog
Re-Launching Our Internal Food Recovery Guide
We’re proud to introduce our new Internal Food Recovery Guide, a practical resource created to help our general managers and chefs nationwide launch and sustain impactful food recovery programs.
Introducing Buen Provecho, a Cookbook for Hispanic Heritage Month
We’re thrilled to mark Hispanic Heritage Month with something truly special: the release of Buen Provecho, a digital cookbook made entirely by members of our culinary teams across the country who proudly identify as Hispanic or Latinx.
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Leading By Example
Bon Appétit Management Company is an on-site restaurant company offering full food-service management to corporations, universities, museums, and other specialty venues. Based in Palo Alto, CA, we operate more than 1,000 cafés in 33 states. Our chefs cook from scratch, including sauces, stocks, and soups. Widely recognized as a pioneer in environmentally sound sourcing policies, we are proud to be the first food service company to:
Directly support small, local farms- Strive to serve only sustainable seafood
- Address antibiotics overuse in our meat supply
- Switch to cage-free eggs, both shell and precracked/liquid
- Tackle food’s role in climate change
- Advocate for farmworkers’ rights
- Commit to pork raised without gestation crates
- Switch to third-party verified humanely raised ground beef
Timeline
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Our commitment to Fair Trade Tea is a decade in the making! 🍵
In October 2015, we were the first food service company to commit to sourcing Fair Trade tea in our cafés nationwide. Nearly 10 years later, we are as committed as ever to the enhanced social responsibility and transparency that the Fair Trade label provides.
Here's how we got there:
➡️ Tea plants thrive in warm, humid climates, meaning most tea is imported from abroad.
➡️ We have long fought for improved labor conditions for farmworkers domestically.
➡️ Unfair labor conditions abroad are myriad. In India alone, tea plantation workers have reported issues of forced labor, gender discrimination, low wages, and high rates of child labor.
What's in your cuppa?
Our partner, Numi Organic Tea, provides us with assorted herbal and caffeinated Fair Trade Certified teas, ensuring fair wages, safe working conditions, and community development premiums to support health, education, and infrastructure projects.
Learn more about our commitment to ethically sourced tea at the link in our bio! #FairTradeTea #EthicalSourcing #NumiOrganicTea #TeaLovers #FarmworkersRights #FairTradeMonth #FairTradeMonth2025
Our bakers and pastry chefs have been exploring the flavors of the season and the dessert trends ...
Our bakers and pastry chefs have been exploring the flavors of the season and the dessert trends storming the internet. Here's a taste of what they've been up to! 😋
1️⃣ @camberssf featured late-season local peaches in their Peach Tarte Tatin with house-made vanilla ice cream.
2️⃣ The flavors of fall are strong at @bakery350, with green apple mousse, spice cake, butterscotch pudding, poached caramel apples, and a walnut crumble.
3️⃣ For dessert night, @scudining featured build-your-own canoli and gelato, a creative Italian treat!
4️⃣ @bonappetitatpacific students tasted the trend for dessert night: Hwachae! This Korean treat is part fruit bowl, part punch, and 100% delicious.
5️⃣ Our LinkedIn team put together these delicate cream puffs topped with cinnamon.
6️⃣ At the Getty Villa, our pastry team hopped on the Dubai chocolate trend in a big way!
#SeasonalDesserts #DessertTrends #FallFlavors
Did you know that the markets for bananas, coffee, tea, and chocolate are prone to price volatility?...
Did you know that the markets for bananas, coffee, tea, and chocolate are prone to price volatility? And that the supply chains are highly vulnerable to exploitation?
That's why fair trade entered the scene back in the 1950s in an effort to create fair, safe working conditions while enriching folks growing and harvesting these goods!
Today, the Fair Trade Certification ensures that workers at certified farms receive fair treatment and fair pay while giving transparency to consumers about whether their product was ethically sourced.
How do farms seek certification? It is a complex and rigorous third-party certification process that takes many months to ensure minimum requirements for labor standards are being met. Following this, there is an annual audit to maintain the label.
We are proud to source Fair Trade tea companywide, working towards better conditions and compensation for producers this Fair Trade Month and beyond!
Learn more about Fair Trade certifications at the link in our bio, including more about price minimums and premiums. #FairTrade #EthicalSourcing #SocialResponsibility #FairTradeMonth #FairTradeMonth2025 #FairTradeCertified
Most Recent News
‘Eat Local Challenge’ lunch tasks Emerson’s chefs with crafting a nearly 100% locally sourced menu
On Tuesday, Sept. 23, chefs at the Dining Center were tasked with crafting the entire lunch menu using only ingredients sourced within a 150-mile radius as a part of the “Eat Local Challenge.”
Inside Penn Dining’s plan to achieve ‘near-zero waste,’ improve sustainability
Penn Dining, the University’s on-campus food service department, and Bon Appétit, the catering company that partners with Penn, are taking steps to adopt sustainable practices and embrace environmentally friendly policies.
How Bon Appétit is building a culture around food education
From 2020 to 2024, Bon Appétit Management Company impacted more than 138,000 guests with its food education programs, including 3,000 children in Healthy Kids cooking classes, 1,500 student athletes learning about performance nutrition, and 1,000 chefs learning about plant-forward cooking.
Join Us
We’re always looking for great people to join our teams! If you:
- Get excited when fresh, local produce arrives on your loading dock
- Enjoy creating all-new dishes from scratch
- Love interacting with people through delicious and nutritious food
- Thrive when part of a close-knit team that takes your and others’ safety seriously
- Enjoy helping people reach their full potential, nourishing them through at-work learning opportunities
Then you may be a fit for us!