Bon Appétit Management Company

On October 17, 2011, Director of Strategic Initiatives and Research Helene York delivered the keynote at the State of the Plate conference in Washington, DC, an event designed to bring meat producers and the culinary community together to engage in discussion about sustainable and humane meat production practices.

The University of Pennsylvania celebrated this year’s National Food Day by kicking off its third annual Food Week: You Are What You Eat, sponsored by Bon Appétit at Penn Dining and supported by Fox Leadership. One of the major goals of Food Week each year is education — raising awareness about food issues in the hopes that awareness will ultimately lead to action.

Second Harvest Food Bank runs a number of crucial programs that feed more than 240,000 people in Silicon Valley each month and as the recession continues, there is a higher need for funds. In the fall, Brocade in San Jose, CA, led a real team effort to raise money for Second Harvest.

  How local can you go — food wise? That was the challenge taken up by dozens of Bon Appétit Management Company chefs in 31 states for the seventh annual Eat Local Challenge on Tuesday, September 27, 2011. Some cooked a meal from 99.9% local ingredients, with salt as the only allowable non-local ingredient. A few went 100% local — meaning they even foraged for salt from within 150 miles of the café. Others focused on serving one excellent local meal. The reasons to source local ingredients are simple but important if you care about sustainability: it tastes better, is more nutritious, encourages biodiversity, preserves open space, and protects the environment, just to name a few. The companywide Farm to Fork program has helped Bon Appétit accounts learn about what’s available in their area throughout the year, and how to use […]

The University of Pennsylvania is now in the midst of its third annual Food Week, sponsored by Bon Appétit at Penn Dining. This annual celebration covers a variety of topics — from local food, to food justice, to nutrition — and is a collaborative effort among students, faculty, local community activists and farmers, and Fox Leadership at Penn. Here are some highlights of last year’s Food Week, including a Food Justice Banquet in the form of a four-course meal (catered by Bon Appétit of course) and a panel on agriculture featuring several of our Farm to Fork partners:

Cooking for a crowd can be stressful, but adding a dash of competition and a pinch of teamwork can lead to amazing culinary creations, as proven by a recent Top Chef-style competition at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.

The Eat Local Challenge has become one of my favorite celebrations each year. While many of our usual holidays come with prescribed dishes, such as turkey and stuffing for Thanksgiving, brisket and matzoh ball soup for Passover, and cookies topped with red and green sprinkles for Christmas, the Eat Local Challenge menu is always different — year to year, chef to chef, and region by region. The challenge is to create an whole menu where every ingredient (except for salt) comes from within 150 miles. While this is no easy task, I also find the challenge to be encouraging. Whether a chef or an eater, it encourages everyone to explore unusual flavors – found on our local farm and range lands and in our forests, lakes, and oceans, to learn about new producers, and tap into our inner creative spirit.

By Cara Brechler, Marketing Manager Summer is over, and fall is here; goodbye peaches and zucchini, hello root vegetables and pumpkins! Pumpkins are an iconic part of the fall season, first appearing as jack-o’- lanterns at Halloween and then later as pie for Thanksgiving. The Market Café in San Jose, CA, wanted to mark the beginning of the season by featuring the pumpkin! Local pumpkins from a Farm to Fork vendor will be for sale for all employees. And true to Bon Appetit’s sustainable standards, people will have the opportunity to use the whole thing. There will be a pumpkin carving contest, where employees can show off their knife skills and potentially win a pizza party for 12! Votes will be cast in three categories, fright factor, laughter inducing, and creativity.  Winning masterpieces will be displayed prominently during lunch on Halloween. Pumpkin […]

Terzo Piano in Chicago, IL, loves to support and celebrate local farmers every day — as well as in a now-annual event it calls Farm to Fork Fest, a special dinner focused on educating guests about where food comes from and why buying from local farms is important.

For the second dinner in our Eat With Bon Appétit series, we once again gathered at Mijita in San Francisco. This time, the guest of honor was Barry Estabrook, author of the new book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. The winner of a 2011 James Beard Award for his blog, Politics of the Plate, Barry has dug deep into the sterile, sandy soil of Florida’s tomato industry to reveal why most of the tomatoes Americans eat have no flavor and to illuminate the equally unsavory labor practices under which these rock-hard fruits are grown.