RE:THINKING | MEET FEDELE'S KITCHEN CABINET

RE:THINKING | MEET FEDELE'S KIT

As we re:open our cafés, we are re:inventing our food programs We’re of course focusing on cleaning, distancing, and packaging, but believe that now more than ever, food still matters.

AS ONE CHEF RECENTLY SAID, “chefs are natural problem-solvers.” CEO Fedele Bauccio has been virtually convening a select group of those MacGyvers under the banner of Fedele’s Kitchen Cabinet. These hand-picked culinarians represent the breadth of our business lines as well as geographies.

They were broken into smaller teams by account type and asked hard questions about reinventing our business. Each group was tasked with creating and sharing tools their peers can use to maintain our made-from-scratch philosophy, with fewer people in the kitchen and different service models. These in-house experts bring a variety of diverse experiences and skill sets to rethinking food service.

Reimagining the roles of commissaries and ghost kitchens on a large campus: Michelle Reuter, Director of Operations, Emory University, Atlanta; Ty Paup, Resident District Manager & Director of Culinary Operations, Brown University, Providence, RI; Patrick McElroy, Director of Culinary Operations, Washington University in St. Louis

Best practices for rethinking self-service stations and ordering ahead through an app: Carrie Pearl, Executive Chef, Foundry & Lux and The Chandlery, South San Francisco, and Jessica Yarr-Pinchin, Campus Executive Chef, Adobe, San Jose

How to use new service models to reinforce our commitments to wellness or plant-forward: Bill Telepan, Culinary Director, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Patrick Youse, Executive Chef, Dreamworks Animation, Los Angeles

Moving beyond the sandwich — culinary techniques for the best food to-go: Robbie Lewis, Regional Culinary Director, Northern California

The Kitchen Cabinet members covered each of the above topics in a live, hour-long webcast with plenty of time for questions. The array of menuing, staff-modeling, and other tools they created are now available for everyone in the company to use.

HEADING TO BASE CAMP

The three Fedele’s Kitchen Cabinet members from large university operations — Michelle Reuter (Emory University), Patrick McElroy (Washington University in St. Louis), and Ty Paup (Brown University) — came up with a labor-saving system called Base Camp.

Bon Appétit has never allowed chefs to buy prepackaged “soup bases” or stock, and we aren’t about to start now. Base Camp leverages Bon Appétit chefs’ cooking-fromscratch expertise in a menu-efficient way, by centralizing the production of “base” sauces, dressings, and ingredi ents such as par-cooked grains. The commissary kitchen team might make a basic Béchamel that other cooks around campus can turn into a broccoli cheddar soup, fettuccine Alfredo sauce, or roasted garlic and sundried tomato sauce. A basic vegan barbecue sauce can become sweet Kansas City style or Korean barbecue with just a few additions.

Pre-pandemic, every Bon Appétit kitchen had a stock pot bubbling away. Now, with smaller staffs, it makes sense to do that in one kitchen for use by all. Michelle, Pat, and Ty also recommend centralizing other preparation, such as cooking whole grains, processing vegetables, and fabricating cuts from whole Farm to Fork animals.

The Bon Appétit Web Development team has already translated the labor-saving and recipe-inspiration ideas of Base Camp into Café Manager, the chef-facing back end of all the company’s individual websites, including with a training video.