Bon Appetit Partners With Food Recovery Network on Campus Waste

Bon Appétit Management Co. has announced a partnership with the Food Recovery Network (FRN), a student-operated nonprofit working on college campuses to curb food waste and end hunger. Bon Appétit and FRN will cooperate in recovering surplus food from campus dining halls and delivering it to local shelters.Since its launch in September 2011, FRN’s student volunteers have recovered 136,000 pounds of food from university dining operations on the 21 campuses where it has chapters, the equivalent of 104,000 meals. Bon Appétit will support FRN’s efforts in three ways:

● BAMCO Foundation West Coast Fellow and Bon Appétit waste expert Claire Cummings is working with FRN’s co-founder and Special Projects Coordinator, Rebecca Kagan, on a feasibility study that will give students and staff tools to determine how much food from dining operations is recoverable. They are also collaborating on a Campus Food Recovery Guide that will walk students and food service providers through the process of launching a food recovery program. It will address frequently asked questions and concerns raised about food donation such as food safety and liability.

● Helping interested students and staff at Bon Appétit-serviced colleges and universities in starting an FRN chapter. The BAMCO Foundation’s three Fellows, who perform educational outreach about sustainable food systems on college campuses for the company, have already launched food recovery programs at Whittier College in the Los Angeles area and American University in Washington, D.C. Others are reportedly in the works.

● FRN works exclusively with universities, but is frequently contacted by non-university businesses and groups interested in donating food. Bon Appétit has shared its research and institutional knowledge of other food recovery programs with FRN so they can assist those would-be donors appropriately.