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05.28.2009

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Food Service Chefs Gone Local, Sustainably

Bon Appétit Management Company might be called the Whole Foods of the foodservice world, but chances are you haven’t seen or experienced the company's meals unless you ate at one of the 400 academic, museum or employer locations the company serves. You may also not know that Bon Appétit's chefs serve 80 million meals a year with at least 20% of those meals sourced from local providers. To find out more about what it's like delivering sustainable foodservice on such a large scale, we asked Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President, at Bon Appétit Management Company, when Bon Appétit got started in sustainability and how it manages to make local work on such a grand scale.

When did Bon Appétit start on the sustainability path?

We started in a really concerted effort around 1999, so we've been at it for about a decade.

Bon Appetit has received numerous awards for its efforts in sustainability and in integrating local foods into your food services, including a recent one from the Environmental Defense Fund. How would you compare Bon Appetit's efforts to more traditional food service providers? Would calling you Whole Foods and them Kroger be a fair analogy?

That's a fair analogy coming from you, and if you're couching who we are in an introduction, then that's a fair comparison.

Have others made those comparison's before between Bon Appetit and Whole Foods?

No not really. Which is pretty surprising. What's really different about Bon Appetit from other foodservice providers is that sustainability is at the core of our brand. It's not a marketing program, it's not something that's secondary, it's how we define ourselves.

You have client locations at both academic and for-profit settings. When you hear back from your customers at these locations, do you find that there's a difference in how students perceive what you're doing vs. working adults in corporate locations?

When we first started marketing our sustainability initiatives, which was in 2004, we'd already been working on those issues for five years. We received a much more immediate positive response from the college campuses. Yet now with many of our corporate clients employing a relatively young, very well educated, cutting edge workforce, we see that the employees aren't that much different from college students either by age or like mindedness. Like Hartman Group research shows, many of these customers would skew toward the Core believer (in sustainability). We're not dealing as much in the other end of the spectrum, though there's some of that. Similar to the most engaged college students, we're basically talking about a well educated, professional customer base at corporate settings.

Yes, I was looking at some of your non-academic, corporate locations, some of those brands, such as eBay and Yahoo!, would seem an ideal place to find someone highly involved with thinking about food quality?

Yes, a Yahoo! employee probably isn't all that different from an engaged college student.

Some of your blogs and the language you use in your communications focus on the impact of food production from a sustainability perspective. Are there certain dimensions within sustainability that consumers seem most interested in such as packaging or food miles?

We saw a peak in interest in packaging probably about a year ago, and now leading edge consumers, or the really committed college students, are understanding, as we do, that packaging is somewhat of a red herring and is not the biggest contributor to climate change, and that so called biodegradable packaging come with its own host of challenges from an environmental perspective. Really, the only answer is in eliminating packaging, not just changing packaging.

Yes, we've had consumers tell us that the best packaging is no packaging.

Absolutely. So, while there's a trail of people who are just waking up to packaging, we're seeing consumers at the forefront asking for no packaging when it comes to take out.

Sustainability and the Brand

While as a foodservice provider Bon Appetit is unique in placing sustainability at the core of its brand, the company isn’t alone among foodservice companies in it’s pursuit of local ingredients and sustainable programs.

Bon Appetit seems alone in what it’s doing, or do you feel that there are others active in this?

We feel very cutting edge, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it's exciting to be a market leader, and it's exciting to travel uncharted territory and to make new discoveries. From a marketing standpoint it's very difficult because we have to explain very complex issues to customers and to the marketplace. As your studies show, customers don't necessarily understand all the terminology and issues around sustainability and local. Even when we talk to the media (or our PR group does), they want four other examples of companies doing what we do, and there really aren't any—there are no other examples, so that's actually the story.

Would you say that your customer base is increasingly aware of what you're talking about when it comes to sustainability?

Yes, although I'd call it a very vocal minority. Still the majority of people on a college campus or a corporate location aren't as well educated about sustainability issues or aren't as engaged. So, the people that really care about these issues, that come to the cafes and ask questions, are well-educated in >sustainability issues and appreciate what we're doing and education in this area.

Your communications indicate that chefs in each of your locations form relationships with local agricultural suppliers, is this the case?

Yes, that's what's unique about Bon Appetit: we've always pushed the purchasing decisions to the executive chefs at the cafe level. This is what has allowed us to move more quickly in local purchasing than other companies. We weren't a centralized system to begin with.

Whereas other foodservice suppliers which might be highly centralized in their distribution might face challenges when it comes to local because of rigid distribution?

Yes, also, where they hold the decision making power is a very big cultural change.

So you've created an independent framework for sourcing local products by enabling chefs to create relationships where they are.

Absolutely. The chef's are the rock stars of our company. We're a very chef-driven culture.

Local Trumps Organic

What’s the umbrella that gets used, a farm that might be supplying organic, but you’re sourcing locally?

Our first choice would certainly be local and organic, but if there's a question about local vs. organic, we'd always go with local. We're equally interested in local products that are grown with organic practices as opposed to being USDA certified organic. That's not a big issue for us. Within our commitment to local we focus on small and medium sized producers. We actually have a cap on the size of the operations and they have to be owner operated. For example, here I am in Palo Alto, and I'm within 150 miles of some of the biggest agribusiness in the world, but that doesn't count as local, even though physically it is, it's not what the heart of our Farm to Fork program is about. It's about owner-operated small and medium-sized production.

Regionally, do you have trouble in different parts of the country sourcing enough local product? Is there a seasonality issue in cold climate areas of the country like New England or the Midwest?

We certainly focus on what's in season but we look beyond produce: Local meat, local cheese, local bread, pasta, charcuterie, honey. There are certain things that are not seasonal. Our company-wide goal is that on an annualized basis each cafe features at least 20% local product, so it might be that in September it's 50% and in January 10% but we find that in our culture a company goal is a minimum, and many locations go beyond 20%. But you’re right, in Minnesota in January it's hard to get to 20%. We have an academic account, Hamilton College, in central New York and they buy the entire stock of a local chicken producer, and they freeze the product, and there still isn't enough to get them through the winter.

You serve about 80 million meals a year; that's a lot of meals to coordinate based on local supply.

Yes, our chefs act much like a home shopper would. We get a lot of questions like "isn't local more expensive" and "with the economy can you still afford to buy locally?" We don't have cycle menus and the menu changes every day. So every week in each location a chef starts with a blank piece of paper and their supplier list and says, "Okay it looks like green beans are in great abundance this week and the price has gone down, so I'll buy more of those, and it looks like the broccoli crop didn't come in, and it's more expensive, so I won't be serving that." Just like a home shopper would in the supermarket.

At this point, what are the biggest challenges ahead?

Our challenge on any of our initiatives these days is transparency in the supply chain. It's really about being able to trace products. Obviously the ones that we buy locally are not the issue: We know where those come from and we can talk to those producers. But when you get beyond local (and we're not serving 100% local food), it’s about transparency in the supply chain. For example, one of our Low Carbon Diet initiatives is about eliminating air freighted seafood, so we need to find out from our suppliers which fish are air freighted. We need all of our chefs to have that information (this would be a lot easier with one decision maker). And we need that information to be on the price sheets and invoices, and the supply chain and the software associated with it is not set up at this point to track these items. So that's a big challenge. Being at the cutting edge means we have to work with suppliers to develop new systems which we hope the rest of the industry will benefit from our work in these areas.

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