Bon Appétit Management Company

In the 1980s, the industry standard for college and corporate cafeterias was casseroles and mystery meat, served glop by glop out of steam tables. If you were seeking a fresh vegetable, you were out of luck unless iceberg lettuce qualified. However, Fedele Bauccio and Ernie Collins, veterans of food service giant Saga Corporation, were convinced that cutting-edge employers and educators were ready for a different kind of food service. So they bought Bon Appétit Catering, a San Francisco-based catering company known for its incredible food presentation, and relaunched it as Bon Appétit Management Company. The new company hired chefs to cook fresh, restaurant-quality food from scratch — and the food-perks arms race began in the young Silicon Valley.

Just like our food choices, our selection of to-go containers and disposable serviceware has environmental impacts. At Bon Appétit Management Company, our first choice is always to encourage the use of china and silverware. When to-go containers are necessary, we try hard to choose those whose production and disposal are the least damaging. Since 2001 we’ve been using plates, clamshells, cups, bowls, and flatware from renewable sources such as corn, sugarcane, and potato starch in select locations. We are conscious that questions remain about the energy inputs required to manufacture and transport these products and the resulting impacts on climate change from both manufacturing and disposal. We continue to research options and await more public, peer-reviewed studies. We are also actively introducing alternatives to disposable containers. At several universities and corporate locations, we have successfully introduced a reusable plastic clamshell for to-go orders.

What happens to the products post-use is crucial as well. We recycle as much as possible and compost at many of our locations, whether through municipal pickups, campus farm onsite piles, or arrangements with local farmers.

As part of our commitment to responsible animal welfare practices and the health of our guests, in 2002 we switched to using milk from cows not treated with rBGH. We later added yogurt to this sourcing standard.*

Recombinant bovine growth hormone (known as rBGH and also in its patented form as rBST) is a genetically engineered hormone that is injected into dairy cows to raise their milk production. It has been shown to increase the rates of mastitis and lameness in cows. A significant body of scientific data has also linked its use to possible increases in certain types of cancer and to antibiotic resistance in humans. Most other industrialized nations have banned the use of rBGH.

*The Food and Drug Administration requires that voluntary labeling of dairy “from cows not treated with rBST” be accompanied by the statement that “No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST-treated and non-rBST-treated cows.” Not all of the suppliers of our other dairy products can guarantee that the milk they use comes from untreated cows.

As a socially responsible company, we are committed to helping address the public health threat from antibiotic resistance.

Since the 1950s, cattle, hogs, and poultry have routinely been given antibiotics to make them grow faster and to prevent and treat diseases caused by the unnatural and unhealthy conditions in which they are being raised. The Food and Drug Administration has estimated that as much as 80% of antibiotics sold in the United States goes to food-producing animals. This overuse has resulted in a human public-health crisis, with the rise of drug-resistant superbugs. Yet withholding antibiotics from sick animals can be inhumane.

As the first food service company to address this issue, we have had a patchwork of different antibiotic policies for many years. In 2002 we partnered with Environmental Defense Fund to look at how we could support decreasing the meat and poultry industry’s abuse of antibiotics, and in 2003, we committed to chicken raised without the routine, “non-therapeutic” use of these drugs in their feed or water — the first food-service company to make this switch. We extended our policy to purchases of turkey breast in 2005 (and to all turkey in 2010), making us the first restaurant company to take a stand on antibiotic use in turkey production.

Starting in March 2007, we began requiring our chefs to purchase ground beef from suppliers who commit that they do not use antibiotics (ever), added growth hormones (ever), or animal byproducts in feed (ever). And as of 2016, all our contracted pork also comes from animals never given non-therapeutic antibiotics or growth promoters.

In January 2019, following extensive consultation with the Center for a Livable Future, an independent group of experts at Johns Hopkins University, we streamlined our antibiotics policy to state that we will strive to buy only meat, and poultry, and seafood raised without the use of antimicrobials, except where necessary to treat sick animals in the documented presence of disease in the flock, herd, or fish population as verified by a veterinarian.

Bon Appétit Senior Fellow Nicole Tocco and Real Food Hamilton leaders Heather Krieger and Victoria Blumenfeld prepare to make food waste visible

At Bon Appétit, we hate food waste with a passion. It’s a big contributor to climate change. Wasting food means you’re also wasting all the energy it took to grow, harvest, transport, and cook it. In addition, food decomposing in landfills releases methane, the greenhouse gas that is 20 to 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States.

As part of our Low Carbon Diet program, Bon Appétit launched a 12-week Food Waste Reduction campaign in all cafés nationwide. By April 2009, we reduced food waste generated in our cafés by 30% through

1. educating chefs and kitchen staff on proper portioning and prepping techniques,
2. a daily waste-monitoring program in all kitchens, and
3. a consumer-waste reduction educational campaign, which included weighing and measuring food at dish return stations and encouraging trayless dining where appropriate.

As a result of these efforts, we achieved a weekly reduction in CO2-equivalent emissions between 40 and 50 tons.

Read more about our subsequent food waste fighting commitments >

Six years after we launched our Farm to Fork program, but long before the word “locavore” entered common usage, we decided to challenge our chefs to hold an event with a meal made completely from local ingredients (defined as coming from within a 150-mile radius of the café). If they wanted to serve a turkey sandwich, for example, then not just the turkey, but also the yeast and wheat for the bread, the milk for the cheese, the eggs for the mayo, et cetera all had to be locally grown. The only exception allowed was salt.

We thought that this challenge would illustrate the homogenization of our regional food choices, but we found the opposite was true. Our chefs were easily able to create amazingly diverse meals using ingredients specific to their food sheds — and an annual tradition was born.

St. Edwards University Executive Chef Elvin Lubrin and Katie Kraemer Pitre, owner of Tecolote Farms, on Eat Local Challenge Day 2013

Eat Local Challenge is hands-down our teams’ and our guests’ favorite companywide event. We love celebrating our local farmers, ranchers, fishermen, and food craftspeople and explaining to our guests why supporting them is so vital to our food supply. Although we serve locally grown food every day in our cafés, highlighting this extreme example of a 100% local meal has started lively conversations amongst guests and our staff. We are proud to be the first food service company to create and celebrate the Eat Local Challenge annually.

Read about 2013’s Eat Local Challenge in Bravo, our company magazine.

While medical experts agree that seafood is a healthful dietary choice, certain fish species may contain toxic levels of mercury. In 2006, we teamed with GotMercury.org to provide the necessary information for people to make educated choices about their seafood consumption. Signage in our cafés directs fish eaters to the GotMercury.org calculator, which they can use to gauge their personal mercury exposure and intake risk.

How we eat is affecting the planet, but a handful of simple dietary choices and practices can have the same impact as switching from driving a large SUV to a more fuel-efficient sedan.

Greenhouse gases created by the food system — including production, distribution, and waste — are responsible for one-third of global emissions. At Bon Appétit, we see that as opportunity to make positive change.

In early 2007, our Low Carbon Diet (developed by our Foundation arm) was the first national program to highlight the significance of food to climate change, and we became the first company to take steps to reduce the food service sector’s contribution to the problem. We partnered with a science research team, headed by the highly respected nonprofit Ecotrust, for data gathering and number crunching. Our campaign was three-pronged:

1. Develop an interactive, database-driven tool, the Low Carbon Diet Calculator, to convey the relative carbon-equivalent emissions impacts of common foods.
2. Recommend menu and operational changes our teams could implement.
3. Create an educational campaign for our chefs, managers, and guests to understand the issues.

As part of the Low Carbon Diet, we developed these five guiding principles for our teams and our guests (for explanations, visit our site Eat Low Carbon):

1. You Bought It, You Eat It — Don’t Waste Food
2. Make “Seasonal and Regional” Your Food Mantra
3. Moooove Away from Beef and Cheese
4. Stop Flying Fish and Fruit — Don’t Buy Air-Freighted Food
5. If It’s Processed and Packaged, Skip It

In 2012, we reached our five-year commitment to reduce the company’s carbon footprint in the highest impact areas by 25 percent. We stopped buying air-freighted seafood entirely, as well as nontropical fruits and vegetables from outside North America. We reduced our use of tropical fruit by half. We shrank our beef purchases by 33 percent and cheese by 10 percent, and our food waste by one-third. These and other efforts achieved reductions of approximately 5 million pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent each month — and more importantly, have been incorporated into our everyday menuing and practices.

In 2015, we updated and relaunched the Low Carbon Diet as the Low Carbon Lifestyle with a renewed focus on four impact areas >

On April 22, 2008, for our first annual Low Carbon Diet Day, all Bon Appétit cafés were transformed into “low-carbon learning” venues. Although operational changes in our kitchens had started one year prior, Low Carbon Diet Day marked the beginning of our customer education campaign and the launch of our interactive website, Eat Low Carbon.

We’ve continued to celebrate Low Carbon Diet Day on or just before Earth Day every year. For this one day, each Bon Appétit café illustrates the principles of the Low Carbon Diet in its menu choices and signage. For example, beef and cheese are high-carbon foods because they come from cows, and cows emit methane gas, which is 20 to 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So, at the grill station on Low Carbon Diet Day, we replace beef burgers with lower carbon choices such as turkey or black bean burgers, and explain the switch with signage.

By highlighting creative and great-tasting low carbon menu options on this particular day, our chefs prove to diners that eating low carbon does not mean sacrificing flavor. In fact, many “Low Carbon Diet Day specials” such as cheeseless pizzas have proven so popular, they’ve become staple menu offerings in our cafés!

In 2013, we reversed our focus. Instead of talking about how food choices affect climate change, we gave guests a taste of how climate change is affecting some favorite foods. To prepare, we commissioned a review of more than four dozen scientific papers projecting how important crops such as corn, wheat, rice, fruit, dairy, and coffee will fare in a changing climate — and what pressures they are already under from climate change. In addition to distilling the research into eye-catching educational signage and materials, we added a performance element to bring it to life. Bon Appétit chefs around the country used a cooking demonstration to discuss these global agriculture trends as well as to encourage guests to choose planet-friendlier foods.

For our seventh annual Low Carbon Diet Day, we’re dialing back the doom and gloom and asking our guests to “meat in the middle,” by swapping beef and dairy for equally flavorful but planet-friendlier options such as chicken, pork, and vegetable-based proteins.

Read the news coverage of Low Carbon Diet Day >

As part of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s mission to provide education about food system issues, in 2009 we began a program of hiring three recent college graduates — who were sustainability champions on their campuses (all Bon Appétit clients) — as our West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast Fellows.

For stints of 1-2 years, the Fellows serve as a resource to students on Bon Appétit campuses in their region and are creative and resourceful in finding the best way to fit into their communities. They often work directly with faculty to integrate food system issues into their curriculum or guest lecture in classes, connecting what students are learning to what they are eating on campus. And, whenever possible, Fellows take students off campus, by hosting field trips to local Farm to Fork vendors or other relevant educational opportunities.

Fellows’ projects are constantly changing, but their focuses have included reducing food waste, defining fair farm labor, creating a network of student gardeners and farmers at colleges around the country, providing support and resources to students interested in running the Real Food Calculator, and starting food recovery programs. Their work provides us with fresh ideas and insight to help us live up to our motto, “food service for a sustainable future.”

Our chefs have always considered it part of their jobs to seek out the best, most flavorful, local ingredients, and Farm to Fork has been embedded in our operating philosophy since 1999.

To help meet our goal of supporting 1,000 Farm to Fork suppliers by the end of 2010 (which we handily surpassed!), we appointed a dozen-plus “foragers” within Bon Appétit. Drawn from the ranks of our chefs and managers, the foragers are located in each of the different regions of the country that we serve. They are tasked with discovering the best small-scale farmers and food producers in their regions and helping their fellow chefs bring these local products into their cafés.

The foragers’ work inspires our chefs to think creatively, about unusual heirloom vegetables and utilizing whole animals. By dedicating staff time to discovering new suppliers, we hope to continue to help more small producers scale their businesses.

Starting Valentine’s Day 2011, as part of our companywide commitment to support farmers and workers both locally and globally, we introduced Cordillera Fair Trade Certified™ baking chocolate to the kitchens of our hundreds of university, corporate, and specialty cafés nationwide.

Cordillera Chocolate, made from a blend of Criollo and Trinitario cacao beans grown in Colombia, is an exceptional brand of chocolate used by renowned chefs worldwide in fine desserts and confections. Cordillera is unique in that it’s not only grown in Colombia, it’s also manufactured there, which leads to higher quality chocolate and better traceability from bean to finished product. The farmers receive a fair price for their beans, as well as fair trade premiums to use for schools, medical clinics, clean water systems, and skills training in their communities. Production workers are employed by Cordillera, a company committed to fair labor practices.

Update: Bon Appétit has ceased using Cordillera since it decided to discontinue Fair Trade certification. We’re actively looking for a national replacement but meanwhile do offer alternative options in select regions. 

The meat industry’s consolidation into a handful of gigantic producers has been accompanied by myriad modern problems such as contaminated food outbreaks, animal mistreatment scandals, and environmental pollution. Yet in the course of seeking out the small-scale hog and poultry farmers and beef ranchers that we have been supporting for years, we’ve discovered that there are responsible, midsize regional producers with similar values struggling to survive and grow.

That’s why in September 2011, we opened registration in our Farm to Fork program — our landmark preferred-purchasing program previously restricted to small farms — to midsize poultry and hog farms, cattle ranches, and dairies that meet our stringent criteria. By doing so, we hoped to nourish this critically endangered segment of agriculture known as the “disappearing middle.” And by requiring third-party certification (by either Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care, or Global Animal Partnership), we hoped to increase the supply of ethically raised meat and poultry, which has not kept up with demand as the meat industry consolidates under ever-more-massive factory farms.

See our Farm to Fork registration criteria >

When most people think of Fair Trade, they think bananas, coffee, or tea. However, cotton is one of the largest commodity crops in the world, and it touches the lives of far more farmers. Fair Trade cotton has been available in the United States since 2005, but only recently has the problem of sweatshops in the garment trade been addressed by Fair Trade certification of both the farms that produce the cotton for the garments and the factories that sew them.

In October 2011, timed to honor Fair Trade Month, we launched a pilot program supplying Fair Trade Certified shirts to student employees in two of our university cafés, with a slogan that read, “Organic, Fair Trade…This Uniform is Ethically Delicious!”

We hope to expand the project to front-of-the-house employees in other Bon Appétit Management Company cafés.

In February 2012 we proudly rolled out the food service industry’s most comprehensive farm animal welfare policy to date, to be implemented in all of our cafés in 31 states.

As part of the new policy, Bon Appétit:

• Required that the contracted pork we serve — currently 3 million pounds annually — come from sows raised in higher-welfare group housing, without unnecessary reliance on cruel gestation crate confinement systems. (The switch was completed in early 2016. In 2019, we notified our supplier that we require full elimination of the use of gestation crates by the end of 2021 and to encourage them to continue their important research on more humane farrowing environments. We would like to see enriched environments for all pigs as well as tail docking and castration either phased out and performed with pain management by 2026, or sooner if there are breakthroughs on resolving these issues.)
• Switched our pre-cracked (liquid) eggs — 11 million eggs annually as of 2012 —from hens confined in barren battery cages to hens living in cage-free farms, as we already do for shell eggs, by 2015.* (Completed in early 2016.)
• Banned foie gras (livers of force-fed ducks) and veal from calves confined in crates from our menus, effective immediately.
• Ridding our supply chain of gestation crates and battery cages represents our minimum standards — and we also set new, aspirational higher ones. We vowed that by 2015, 25 percent or more of our meat, poultry, and egg purchases companywide should be sourced from producers whose practices meet the animal welfare standards of Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, Humane Farm Animal Care or Global Animal Partnership. These four programs not only prohibit such cruel practices as gestation crates and battery cages, but also require animals to be allowed to engage in their natural behaviors. (Update: We achieved this goal in July 2017.)

Read a detailed report card on these goals or watch Chief Strategy and Brand Officer Maisie Ganzler’s TEDxManhattan talk about the behind-the-scenes challenges, “How the Humane Sausage Gets Made.”

Some of the news coverage of our initial announcement:

• Bon Appétit Announces Animal Welfare Reforms, Washington Post
• Bon Appétit “Sets the Bar for Animal Welfare for Major Food Service Providers,” New York Times
• Beyond Porkwashing: Food Service Company Commits to Humane Meat, Grist
• The Most Sweeping Anti-Cruelty Policy in the Food Service Industry, Atlantic
• Bon Appétit Cafés to Forgo Pigs Housed in Cramped Cages, Los Angeles Times
• Progress Toward Sustainable Meat Trots Along with Recent Developments, Chicago Tribune

*Like our shell eggs, liquid eggs are certified as being “cage free” by Animal Welfare Approved, Food Alliance, or Humane Farm Animal Care (GAP does not certify eggs)

By 2012, eating locally and seasonally had become a significant trend. Many Americans now know the names of the farms that grow their food, but even as we’re urged to eat more fish for its health benefits and its gustatory pleasures, few consumers can identify sustainable local species or the fishing operations that supply them.

The time was ripe for local fish. On September 25, 2012, we hosted our first-ever Eat Local (Fish) Challenge, which was held simultaneously in all 32 states in which we operate. The event was an outgrowth of the Eat Local Challenge, which we launched in 2005 as a fun way to highlight locally harvested, seasonal flavors through a meal made entirely of locally grown ingredients. For the Eat Local (Fish) Challenge, local seafood — sustainably caught or farmed within 500 miles by a Fish to Fork partner — had to be one of those ingredients. In addition to the special all-local meal, our teams offered educational information about sustainable seafood, the particular seafood item being served, Five Reasons to Eat Local Fish, and a take-home recipe for a regional fish dish.

Our chefs found, cooked, and served more than 50 different species of regional seafood, from amberjack to yellowtail, and relished the new twist on an old challenge. Read about how they got hooked on local fish in Bravo, our company magazine, or check out the news coverage in the Boston Globe, Forbes.com, and Sustainable Business Oregon.

The average age of U.S. farmers is 57 and is getting older. But in the last few years, there’s been good news: the number of young people entering farming seems at last to be on the rise.

Many of these for-profit growers got their hands dirty for the first time in college, volunteering on a farm or even banding together to start one at their alma mater. To support these efforts, the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation launched Campus Farmers, an online network that connects students and staff growing food on college campuses across the country. The network aims to facilitate conversations and the sharing of resource sharing between all of those passionate about growing food, from wannabe campus growers to those who have already set down roots.

Campus Farmers is the Web 3.0 version of the Foundation’s 2009 Student Garden Guide. This resource hub offers a wealth of information about starting an on-campus farm, managing farm finances, and staying in business. Through the website, users can connect to an online document library and browse important farm resources such as project proposals and farm business plans. And if they want to find out, say, a chemical-free way to fight an infestation of tomato worms, they can pose the question to the Campus Farmers Facebook group or join one of the Campus Farmer Conversations Webinars, a platform for discussing both common challenges and best practices associated with growing food on campus.

In 2015, we decided to help corporate employees get in on the fun, with materials for corporate campus farmers. Just like college campus farms, these newcomers are a diverse bunch with a wide range of goals. Some projects focus on cultivating employees’ gardening skills while others prioritize growing more local food for the on-site kitchens or providing unique ingredient that chefs can’t find anywhere else. Whatever the garden’s particular mission, these initiatives foster greater engagement in the food system and appreciation for the story behind the food — both activities near and dear to our hearts at Bon Appétit.

For many family farmers, ranchers, and artisans, the act of producing food is about community, a way to share their craft and expertise with people and connect with something larger than themselves.

Since the 1999 launch of our Farm to Fork program, Bon Appétit has worked to source at least 20 percent of our ingredients from small local farms, ranches, and food businesses, bringing food grown within 150 miles of our kitchens onto the menu. Conceived as a way to strengthen the communities in which we live, work, and play and to showcase regional flavors, Farm to Fork has resulted in hundreds of successful partnerships across the nation.

But sourcing locally grown food isn’t the only way to build a more sustainable food system. Over the years we connected with vibrant local businesses near our cafés that may not actually grow food like our Farm to Fork partners do, but they craft delicious products in traditional ways, and make a concentrated effort to sustain their community through their business practices. Businesses like a group of Latino women making handmade tortillas the same way their great-grandmothers did, a small-batch chocolatier sourcing Fair Trade cacao beans, or a bakery that makes a point of hiring and training formerly incarcerated gang members.

Lick Honest Ice Cream in Austin, TX, uses milk from a local dairy as well as seasonal, local ingredients in its ice cream

In addition, our Locally Crafted vendors must meet at least two of the following criteria:

• Locally Sourced: At least 50% of the product’s ingredients are from small, owner-operated farms within 150 miles of the Bon Appétit kitchen.
• Responsibly sourced: At least 50% of the product’s ingredients are responsibly sourced as verified by an approved third-party organization, such as Certified Organic or Fair Trade.
• Humanely sourced: The eggs, dairy, and protein in the product meet all Bon Appétit’s own sustainability standards.
• Traditional/artisan: The product is a staple of a specific cuisine, made in the traditional manner with a minimum of additives and preservatives, or in small batches by hand using traditional methods.
• Justice through ownership: The business is majority minority or woman-owned and -controlled.
• Justice through training: As a founding principle, the business seeks to provide job opportunities to a disadvantaged population.

We are proud to nourish the people in our local Bon Appétit communities who — like us — are trying to change the food system through their businesses.

We partnered with the San Francisco Giants to open The Garden at AT&T Park in San Francisco, a first-of-its kind venue at a Major League ballpark. Supplying fresh-picked greens, vegetables, and fruit for Bon Appétit’s ballpark menus, the Garden is both a unique gathering place for fans to enjoy AT&T Park before and during games and a culinary classroom for children in the community.

Learn more about the Garden at AT&T Park >

Perhaps because the vast majority of the tuna Americans eat comes a precooked beige in cans, people seem to forget it’s a fish. Jessica Simpson famously asked if “chicken of the sea” was chicken or fish. Well Jessica, tuna are fish — and they’re in big trouble! All that canned tuna we eat is having a negative effect not just on tuna species like albacore and skipjack, but also on center-of-the-plate “fancy” tuna. To help reverse this dismaying trend, many conservation groups have called for a ban on the use of all fish-aggregating devices, or FADs.

What’s a FAD? It sounds innocuous enough. Fish like to congregate around objects in the water — underwater and on the surface. Scuba divers know this. That’s why they seek out reefs and sunken ships. Fishermen are also well aware of this predilection, too. For centuries, fishermen around the world have been making floating FADs out of bamboo, scrap wood, and metal or whatever they have on hand to attract fish.

What was harmless on a small scale becomes problematic as it gets bigger. According to 2012 research by Pew Charitable Trusts, there are now as many as 100,000 drifting FADs around the world — basically floating pieces of junk put into the ocean and equipped with transponders by the global purse seine fishing industry. These FADs allow industrial fleets to quickly find — and harvest — large masses of fish.

Here’s the catch (pun intended): Their purse seines are enormous nets that draw closed like a purse, surrounding and capturing all the life attracted to the FAD, not just the target species. That “bycatch” can include sharks, swordfish, marlin, and juvenile fish such as bigeye tuna — which then don’t have the chance to reproduce, further destabilizing the world’s fish populations.

Bon Appétit Management Company is proud to announce that starting in January 2015, all of the skipjack tuna we purchase — currently 233,000 pounds, or 91.5% of all processed tuna we buy — will be caught without the use of FADs. Our supplier has committed that every tuna shipment destined for our cafés will be accompanied by a signed statement from the boat captain including date caught, location, and a commitment that no fish aggregating device was used.

Read press release >

While more and more Americans are thinking about where their food comes from, few if any are thinking about the hands that picked the leaves in their cup of tea. But Bon Appétit is. We’ve long recognized and celebrated the people at the very beginning of our supply chain, for example through our Farm to Fork program and advocacy for farmworkers’ rights. Tea may start a few extra thousand miles away from where our vegetable and animal protein stories begin, but we’re up for the challenge.

“Bon Appétit Management Company has been and continues to be a true leader in sustainable sourcing. They were one of the first food service providers to bring U.S. farmworker issues to the limelight, and are again blazing trails to support tea farmers and workers worldwide through Fair Trade. Wherever the bar was set in the industry, Bon Appétit has raised it.”
— Sri Artham, Vice President of Consumer Packaged Goods, Fair Trade USA

Bon Appétit is proud to be the first food service provider to make a commitment to Fair Trade tea. On October 1, 2015, in honor of Fair Trade Month, we announced we were switching all the tea* we serve our guests — including single-serve brewed and bulk-brewed (hot and cold) — to Fair Trade Certified tea. We have selected Numi^® Tea as our preferred supplier of Fair Trade brewed tea. In locations where bottled and/or canned teas are sold, our cafés will also offer Honest Tea^® as a Fair Trade Certified option.** Accounts will have one year to make these changes.

The story of most tea is hard to swallow. The majority of leaves are grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya, where they are picked almost exclusively by hand and mostly by women (75 percent). Workers on tea plantations often face human rights abuses, cripplingly low wages, and health issues caused by the backbreaking work of picking and pesticide exposure. On small farms, the same is true, compounded with international market pressures that yield minuscule profits for small growers.

By moving to Fair Trade Certified tea, Bon Appétit is helping to alleviate poverty in ways that improve lives, empower communities, and protect the environment. Fair Trade offers producers stable prices, a Fair Trade premium (paid on top of the agreed Fair Trade price, the premium is used to invest in local communities, often going toward education, healthcare, or farm improvements) and empowers farmers and workers (committees comprising men and women democratically decide how their premium is used). It also sets standards for safe working conditions, sustainable wages, and rewards and encourages farming and production practices that are environmentally sustainable.

Everybody wins — including the Bon Appétit guests who can enjoy a calming cup knowing they are contributing to a more just and sustainable system.

*The only exceptions to this policy are where it conflicts with requirements from our nationally branded concept partners, and the tea we source through enrolled Farm to Fork vendors.

**Our Pepsi®-exclusive units may offer Honest Tea only if their agreement allows for it. 

When Bon Appétit started our Low Carbon Diet program in 2007 — making us the first restaurant company to connect food and climate change — it was with specific targets in mind for how much carbon emissions we wanted to lose over five years. And we did it, meeting our goals and resulting in reductions of the equivalent of approximately 5 million pounds of carbon dioxide each month.

After a few years of happily maintaining our weight, we decided it was time to mentally move from a time-limited diet aimed at a quick reduction to a long-term, sustained way of living. Enter the Low Carbon Lifestyle, a new set of commitments that we can live for the foreseeable future and continue our dedication to reducing the climate-changing impacts of our food choices. We consulted with food and climate change experts across the country, from the Environmental Working Group to the Union of Concerned Scientists and Rainforest Alliance. We settled on these four focus areas:

PRIORITIZING PLANT-BASED PROTEINS

• Serving reasonable, clearly defined portions of animal proteins based on U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommendations
• Skewing the menu mix away from beef and cheese
• Emphasizing plant-based proteins
• Tracking the ounces of various proteins we serve per guest per meal period, to make sure we stay on target

PREVENTING AND REDUCING FOOD WASTE

Prioritizing waste reduction according to the EPA’s Wasted Food Scale*, to make landfills our last resort

• Requiring our teams to actively engage in preventing waste at the source, by tracking their participation in our Imperfectly Delicious Produce program
• Continuing to prevent waste in their kitchens and recording their efforts using a waste tracking system (now by using our proprietary software Waste Not™)
• Donating leftovers to local hunger relief organizations on a regular, not occasional basis.  (In 2015, we made a goal that by 2018, 80% of our accounts would be Food Recovery Verified. While the majority of our accounts are regularly donating food, we did not meet our verification goal. In 2024, we recommitted to meeting this goal by the end of the year.)

TRIMMING TRANSPORTATION

Examining both distance traveled and, more critically, the mode of transportation when we’re making purchasing decisions in order to prioritize carbon-efficient transportation of food.

• No air-freighted seafood
• Restricting purchases of vegetables, meat, non-tropical fruit, and bottled water to North America
• Encouraging purchases of seasonal and regional fruits and vegetables
• Training chefs and managers how to prioritize tropical fruit that is typically boated or trucked versus air-freighted when needed

DECREASING DEFORESTATION

Supporting sustainable forestry and agricultural management through our purchasing practices:

• Purchasing meat from North American farms and ranches (fed with U.S.-grown crops)
• Opting for paper products that are FSC Certified and/or made from recycled content
• Setting measurable goals for purchasing coffee from Certified Organic, shade-grown, Rainforest Alliance or Bird Friendly certified (by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center) farms

At the same time, just like a diet plan often asks you to get on a scale, we’re weighing our progress on a monthly basis using our Food Standards Dashboard to make sure we stay on track with our goals.

*When we launched the Low Carbon Lifestyle in 2015, we followed the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, which was updated in 2023 to become the Wasted Food Scale. 

In 2012 we vowed to take a series of concrete steps to improve the welfare of animals in our food supply, including ceasing all purchases of foie gras and crated veal, switching to Certified Humane ground beef, to cage-free precracked (a.k.a. liquid) eggs (our shell eggs have been cage free since 2005), and to pork from sows raised without dependence on gestation crates.

The final remaining challenge was to source at least 25 percent of all our meat, poultry and egg purchases companywide from producers that meet one of four third-party animal welfare humane certifications: Humane Farm Animal Care, Animal Welfare Approved, Global Animal Partnership (GAP), and Food Alliance. These four represent the top tier in verifiable standards, ones that not only prohibit such cruel practices as gestation crates and battery cages, but also require animals to be allowed to engage in their natural behaviors.

In July 2016 we first hit that target, and we completed fiscal 2017 at 26.7% certified product. Millions of Bon Appétit’s purchasing dollars are now being directed monthly to both small and large producers who treat their animals responsibly and humanely.

Americans use more than 500 million straws every day — more than one per man, woman, and child. Numerous campaigns in England and some U.S. cities have sprung up to ban these sucky polluters.

On April 18, the University of Portland in Portland, OR, became the first U.S. university to ban plastic straws at all food or beverage outlets on campus, in partnership with Bon Appétit Management Company, the university’s food service provider. A few days after UP announced its ban, a California school also went strawless, followed on April 25 by Knox College in Illinois (which, like UP, is a Bon Appétit client).

And on May 31, Bon Appétit announced that it was banning straws and plastic stirrers companywide, in our 1,000 cafés and restaurants in 33 states. The phase out has begun and will be completed by September 2019.

Bon Appétit is the first food service company — or major restaurant company — to make this commitment in the country.

Bon Appétit Management Company has long been aware of the threat to public health posed by the animal agriculture industry’s routine abuse of antibiotics — to promote faster-than-normal growth and to prevent disease in healthy animals. Since 2003, we have enacted various purchasing standards to support producers who are using antibiotics responsibly.

In January 2019, following extensive consultation with experts at the Center for a Livable Future at John Hopkins University, we announced a revised purchasing policy designed to streamline what had been a patchwork of standards by species, as well as to reflect positive changes in the marketplace and to continue pushing the industry forward.

Bon Appétit Management Company is committed to supporting farms whose practices eliminate the need for routine antimicrobials. (“Antimicrobials” is a more comprehensive term for the class of drugs that includes antibiotics) We believe strongly that good farm-animal health should rely on healthy living conditions for the animals, not drugs. Our new purchasing standard companywide is to buy only meat, and poultry, and seafood raised without the use of antimicrobials except where necessary to treat sick animals in the documented presence of disease in the flock, herd, or fish population as verified by a veterinarian.

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Until now, little research has been done to understand why people dining out leave food on their plates. It’s a problem that the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates to account for 20 percent of all food wasted in the U.S. To better understand the causes of edible plate waste in university dining and corporate café environments, Bon Appétit Management Company, in collaboration with NRDC, conducted a study whose findings were released in the whitepaper “Toward Cleaner Plates: A Study of Plate Waste in Food Service.” (Download report)

The study tracked how much plate waste was generated at 20 Bon Appétit cafés across the country over a variety of meal periods. The locations were evenly divided between cafés located at business and industry locations and institutions of higher education and covered a total of 40 meal periods surveyed between May 2018 and March 2019. During the study period, plate scrapings were obtained from more than 12,000 individuals, 1,572 of whom completed a written survey.

For some of the key findings of the report, read the press release.

The second generation of our proprietary Food Standards Dashboard launched in 2022. We expanded the capabilities of the industry’s most sophisticated sustainability and wellness reporting tool to incorporate more than a dozen new indicators and expanded data capture capability in a highly visual, easy-to-navigate format. The Food Standards Dashboard is available to all Bon Appétit accounts at no additional cost, giving chefs and general managers actionable data that helps them make their operations and menus more sustainable and healthier for guests. Sound like a bold claim? The Dashboard has the data to back it up! Dedicated tabs for purchasing, climate change, plant-forward menuing, and wellness each pull information from purchasing, finance, and menu management systems, to synthesize a complex set of data and compare it against a long list of business rules in order to calculate compliance. Curious about the greenhouse gas emissions related to purchases? Check the climate change tab. Want to see the breakdown of animal versus plant protein purchases? The plant-forward tab has the answer! The tool offers a wide variety of new features including:

• Color-coded indicators, downloadable graphs, trend lines, and charts that offer at-a-glance action items for chefs and managers.
• Rollup/rolldown functionality so data can be monitored at the café or campus level (for large operations with multiple cafés).
• Robust reporting on local purchasing and compliance with a wide variety of sustainability criteria at the product level.
• World Resources Institute-compatible data tracking offers a snapshot of where greenhouse gas emissions are most impactful in an operation.
• Animal and plant products are tracked and measured by both weight and spend, showing a café’s adherence to Bon Appétit’s plant-forward initiative.
• “The Wellness Plate” offers an easy-to-understand visualization of how the average plate in a café aligns with the guidelines of the EAT Lancet Commission’s diet for planetary and human health.

Read the press release to see a complete list of features and capabilities.