Bon Appétit Management Company

Meet Bon Appétit’s nominee for 2023 Chef Appreciation Week Chef of the Year, Doran Payne!

When Bon Appétit Fellow Elise Dudley and over a dozen Vassar College students caravanned out to Amenia, NY earlier this year, they expected to learn firsthand about the dairy industry and meet a storied local Farm to Fork partner. They got even more, including a lesson in emerging cooperative models that protect small dairy farms.  

In New York’s Hudson Valley, Farm to Fork vendor Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy offers an alternative dairying model that insulates small dairy farmers negative trends impacting the dairy industry.

Under the leadership of Culinary Director Kristela Nazario-Mendoza, the Bon Appétit Management Company at Chase Center team is putting Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program into action at one of the world’s premier sporting arenas.

The aroma of pizza crust, orange peels, chicken bones, and half-eaten sandwiches has become an all too familiar scent to Bon Appétit Management Company’s Midwest Fellow Elise Kulers and east coast Fellow Elise Dudley, who have weighed over 1,500 pounds of food waste produced by over 8,500 guests at colleges and universities this year.

Black Americans are still the victims of institutional racism and often unchecked discrimination, and we want to create space in our cafés this Juneteenth for community partners to observe this holiday how they want to.

Across the country, Bon Appétit teams have been hard at work paving the way for a plant-forward revolution. The Bon Appétit Fellows have embarked on a similar mission to spread inspiration and knowledge about how to cook with vegetables through a series of plant-based cooking demonstrations for college students.  

These LGBTQ+ organizations are just a handful of the many working to create a more inclusive and equitable food system from the farm to the kitchen and beyond. 

Although rainbow-colored merch, food, and ads aren’t necessarily bad things, there has been a trend of using rainbows to build credibility without providing meaningful support to LGBTQ+ communities. We explore this concept and what queer food really is.

We break down the difficulties in discovering the queer history of food and explore five key LGBTQ+ culinary figures that have defined American cuisine as we now know it.