Enjoy a virtual cup of coffee with Fedele Bauccio, CEO & Co-Founder of Bon Appétit Management Company!
Chat with legendary restaurant pioneer Fedele Bauccio, who has won multiple awards for entrepreneurship and sustainability, about how he revolutionized corporate dining, university food service, and museum restaurants, why he’s passionate about teaching cooking to kids, and what he thinks the next trends in food are (hint: he’s big on plant-based).
Fedele Bauccio cofounded Bon Appétit Management Company, which provides food service to 1,000-plus cafés located at corporations, universities, and museums in 33 states, in 1987. Together Fedele and Bon Appétit have revolutionized the food service industry, both by introducing fresh, made-from-scratch food to the contract market and by pioneering environmentally and socially responsible practices designed to create a more sustainable food system. The launch of Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program in 1999 marked the first of many commitments to sustainable purchasing.
Bon Appétit is the first food service company to commit to serving only seafood that meets Seafood Watch sustainability guidelines (since 2002), to reducing antibiotic use in farm animals (2003); to switching to rBGH-free milk (2003), cage-free shell eggs (2005), humanely raised ground beef (2012), and gestation-crate- free pork (2016); tackling food’s role in climate change (2007), and to addressing farmworker rights (2009).
Fedele’s work has been honored by many nonprofit and industry groups. He has been named a Most Admired CEO: Community Champion by the San Francisco Business Times, received EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year National Retail and Consumer Products Award, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Lifetime Achievement Award, and one of the James Beard Foundation’s inaugural Leadership Awards. Bon Appétit has also received the Sustainable Purchasing Leadership Council’s Leadership Award for Overall Sustainable Purchasing Program and the Acterra Award for Sustainability; in March 2020 the Humane Society of the United States ranked Bon Appétit the #1 food service company, the only one with an A+ grade.