August 10, 2004

Caterer turns the tables
By Rukmini Callimachi, From The Associated Press

PORTLAND - A major cafeteria management chain has torn up its mission statement and rewritten it to signal its move toward an entirely sustainable system of food delivery.

Bon Appetit Management Co., which serves a million meals each week at on-site restaurants at more than 150 corporations, is asking each of its chefs to use locally grown fruits and vegetables, and meat which is free of hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified feed.

Oil used to fry French fries will be recycled and turned into environmentally friendly diesel fuel. Only wild salmon and dolphin-safe tuna is to be served.

"It's the difference between night and day," said Joe McGarry, a Bon Appetit employee who has been the executive chef of Oregon's Intel campus for the past seven years.

The change toward a full-fledged sustainable food system is a process that has evolved over the course of several years, but has only been rolled out as part of the Palo Alto, Calif., company's mission statement last week.

It was in Oregon, where farmers markets and sustainable living practices abound, that the company tested the concept of sustainable food delivery two years ago and discovered that serving healthy meals made good business sense.

"We've done enough focus group studies to realize that people are willing to pay a little bit more for something that's better," said Fedele Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appetit.

Founded in 1987 as a catering company, Bon Appetit's goal was to bring restaurant techniques to the cafeteria world.

"We don't even use the name `cafeteria' in our company. It was banned. Cafeteria food has a bad rap. We were trying to come up with a restaurant approach," Bauccio said.

Early on, the company opted for fresh ingredients, but found itself disappointed in what was available.

"Meat didn't taste the way it used to taste because we'd lost our local producers. Things were being grown thousands of miles away. Vegetables were picked before they were ripe," said Maisie Ganzler, director of corporate communications and industry relations for Bon Appetit.

"Because we don't use heavy sauces, because we don't use MSG, because we grill and saute things lightly, we count on food to have its full flavor," she said.

To recapture that flavor, Bon Appetit found itself re-creating the food chain in order to have full quality control.

In the late 1980s, the company became the first commercial caterer to use canola oil and to ban tuna that was not dolphin-safe, Ganzler said.

In 2000, Bon Appetit signed on to the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program, which ranks seafood based on its impact on the environment. "If we can't get wild salmon, we don't serve salmon, it's that simple," Bauccio said.

But what the company has achieved in Oregon is the company's "gold standard."

Here, Bon Appetit works with Sunshine Dairy to get milk that is free of artificial growth hormones. Its crusts and pastries are made from flour milled by a consortium of wheat growers in Eastern Washington that do not till the soil after harvest, decreasing runoff and increasing topsoil.

"I have a tomato farmer whose pick date is one day before we serve it. I have a berry farmer who calls wanting to know how many flats to bring because he's picking the berries just for us," says McGarry, Intel's chef.

By altering its mission statement, Bauccio says he hopes to bring every one of its on-site restaurants up to the same standard.

With accounts in 26 states serving more than 150,000 meals a day from the headquarters of Best Buy to the basement cafe at the Art Institute of Chicago, practices have varied widely.