Create the Best Product, and the Profit Will Follow

In the following video, we hear from Fedele Bauccio, founder and CEO of Bon Appetit Management. His company has built its reputation on locally sourced, seasonal, healthy foods and is actively involved in sustainability issues affecting every aspect of the food industry.

We look at the chef's responsibility in a company such as Bon Appetit. Beyond just creating great-tasting food, Bauccio's chefs must search out fresh, local, high-quality ingredients.

A transcript follows the video.

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Isaac Pino: While we're speaking about chefs, I've read some of the pieces that you've done. You said you've published in many different news sources, Huffington Post being one of them. When it comes to chefs -- and you mentioned this earlier -- there's an important aspect of what they do that almost always revolves around taste.

Some of these star chefs say that their responsibility is to taste, and in some cases they have no responsibility to where the food comes from, the sustainability of the food, whether it's sourced appropriately. Would you agree with that? What is a chef's responsibility, at the end of the day?

Fedele Bauccio: Yeah, taste and flavor are critical, but I think the chef's responsibility, at least in our company, is to figure out within 150 miles of his or her kitchen, where he can buy and source the best products that are seasonal, to create authentic recipes.

So sourcing is a critical issue. If we bring in and source authentic and really great ingredients, then they don't have to do a lot with it. They don't have to mask the food with all kinds of sauces and junk, and so forth.

I like food to be very simple and clean tasting, and know that it's healthy and the animals were raised right, or the soil was terrific where they grew their vegetables from, and so forth.

Our chef's responsibility is not only to be able to produce that food, but before they do that they've got to work with the ranchers and go into the fields and audit them to make sure that they're buying the very best ingredients they can buy.

We spend a lot of money on sourcing and the food, and if we do that right, it seems like everything else falls into place.