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Sustainable Food Highlights
Winter 2014 Issue
Table of Contents
BAMCO's Annual Holiday Gift to Support FoodCorps
Heroes for Hens: The Importance of Cage-Free Eggs
CEO Fedele Bauccio in the Harvard Business Review
Celebrating Our 9th Annual Eat Local Challenge
Shaking Our Salty Habits for Food Day
Johns Hopkins University Signs the Real Food Pledge
Bon Appétit in the News
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Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful, restorative time with your families - however you define them - and feel refreshed and ready as 2014 gets under way.

The past few months have been busy ones for us, with initiatives old (celebrating our 9th annual Eat Local Challenge) and new (extending our leadership in healthy cooking with a sodium reduction campaign). Even as the World Society for the Protection of Animals was interviewing me about our 2005 commitment to cage-free shell eggs, we've been working hard to line up suppliers of cage-free, pre-cracked eggs so we can make that switch as well by our 2015 deadline. 


When we do, we'll be the first food service company to have taken a stand in this unglamorous yet enormous side of the egg industry. I am proud to say we have just made an important step toward another part of our 2015 commitment, phasing out all pork raised with gestation crates: We've secured a companywide source for gestation-crate-free bacon!

I look forward to sharing more good news with you in the coming months.

Warmest regards, 

Fedele 
 
Fedele  

BAMCO's Annual Holiday Gift to Support FoodCorps

FoodCorps Service Member Peter Kerns with Missoula (Montana) County Public School 2nd graders. Photo credit: Kelly Campbell

Every year, we make a donation to a food-related nonprofit on behalf of our clients. We are proud to have chosen the young organization FoodCorps as the recipient of our 2013 Holiday Gift. Through its partnership with AmeriCorps, FoodCorps recruits, trains and places young people into limited-resource schools for a year of service dedicated to transforming the school food environment. Bon Appétit's contribution funds five FoodCorps service members, who will teach approximately 4,000 kids about healthy eating and a healthy food system, connect them to local farms, and plant gardens with them. Read more

Heroes for Hens: The Importance of Cage-Free Eggs

Melissa Miller, executive chef at SAP, being interviewed

Back in 2005, Bon Appétit became the first food service company to switch to cage-free shell eggs, and in 2012, the first to commit to cage-free, pre-cracked eggs. As part of its Choose Cage-Free campaign, the World Society for the Protection of Animals interviewed CEO Fedele Bauccio, Vice President of Strategy Maisie Ganzler, and SAP Executive Chef Melissa Miller on why we led the way and the benefits of cage-free eggs, to inspire other companies to switch. Watch Fedele and Maisie talk about our companywide policy and read Melissa's guest blog post, which includes a recipe for Israeli Shakshuka eggs.  

CEO Fedele Bauccio in the Harvard Business Review

Bon Appétit Management Company was founded in 1987 on the novel idea that employees are happier, more productive workers when they are fed quality food. Now, delicious and healthy food is the baseline, and Bon Appétit is once again breaking new ground. Dining is more than about food - it's about the whole experience. Read CEO Fedele Bauccio's piece in the Harvard Business Review about how BAMCO is crafting unique food experiences at Google, Oracle, Starbucks, and elsewhere.
Celebrating Our 9th Annual Eat Local Challenge
See Eat Local Challenge photos and stories in Bravo, BAMCO's quarterly newsletter
On September 24, Bon Appétit chefs across the country prepared meals made entirely from local ingredients harvested within a 150-mile radius of their cafés as part of our ninth annual Eat Local Challenge. This year, we highlighted just how far the local-food movement has come in those nine years, with farmers' markets and community supported agriculture programs both booming. Dozens of guests submitted pictures of their all-local meal to our social media photo contest, and we were pleased to pick a student from University of Portland in Portland, OR, as our winner.  


Watch a video of the Eat Local Challenge festivities that took place at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, and check out some tips for ingredients that are the easiest to find locally (a recipe for local honey and milk egg custard is included). Read all about ELC Day in Bravo

Shaking Our Salty Habits for Food Day 

At Bon Appétit, we've always been conscious of the health hazards posed by salt and found ways to minimize its use in our kitchens. Yet most Americans are still consuming way too much salt, and more than 75% of that daily sodium intake comes from processed and restaurant foods. We teamed up with the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) to take our efforts a step further. In the weeks leading up to Food Day, an annual nationwide celebration started by CSPI, our teams did back-of-the-house trainings and tastings with their staff, then hosted guest education activities and tastings and unveiled lower-sodium condiment stations featuring house-made sauces. Read more about our sodium reduction efforts

Johns Hopkins University Signs the Real Food Pledge

Congratulations to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for not only committing to the Real Food Challenge, a nationwide campaign to shift university spending towards purchasing local, sustainable food, but also for upping the ante from the baseline of 20 percent to 35 percent "real food" by the year 2020! Johns Hopkins joins fellow Bon Appétit schools Oberlin College, Macalester College, Wesleyan University, and Cornell College in signing the challenge, which we're proud to support. Read more in the Baltimore Sun, and watch JHU Executive Chef Robert Lavoie talk about sustainable cooking on HuffPost Live. 

Bon Appétit in the News