Bon Appetít Management Company (BAMCO) is a leading café and catering services company, with a strong commitment to environmental and social responsibility.
Industry: Catering
Service: Feedback—energy evaluation throughout supply chain
Bon Appetít Management Company (BAMCO) is a leading café and catering services company, with a strong commitment to environmental and social responsibility. They have a high interest in enabling awareness of food choices on local and global health, helping customers and companies make conscious choices about what they eat.
In Spring of 2007, Natural Logic conducted a supply-chain assessment of the energy impact of an array of Bon Appetít food commodities, in partnership with Suryatech. Steps included:
- Food production systems research, identifying energy and energy intensive inputs at the farm-level, processing, and cooking stages
- Structuring and managing information from a vast array of sources to allow comparability and facilitate analysis.
Modeling system-wide energy use per commodity for a variety of transport scenarios Bon Appetít is currently assessing the results. Ultimately the goal is to answer questions like “if I choose the 4-oz ribeye vs. the pasta primavera, what’s the energy impact?” This will both support internal intelligence as well as raising customer awareness, enabling public choice with transparent and meaningful information.
One general conclusion is that for those concerned about energy use and climate change, eating lower-processed, lower-on-the-food-chain, and closer-to-home options as largely agrees with conventional wisdom. However, other conclusions are not necessarily part of conventional wisdom – e.g. that for many commodities, transport distance may not be a major driver of supply-chain impacts.