This is our new thing,” says the white-jacketed chef, stepping through his kitchen, a study in stainless steel and oak. He points toward a row of spotless white buckets on the floor of the walk- in refrigerator. “Making our own pickles.”
The clientele for chef Scott Richter’s sour gourds?
Not the party of four, wearing blazers and skirts and sipping Bordeaux at the country inn.
Not the couple out for a romantic bistro dinner.
Not even the cop picking up lunch at a neighborhood deli.
No, it would be the people who work at White Wave Foods in Broomfield. They get the house-made pickles — made from organic Colorado cucumbers — when they eat at the company cafeteria.
White Wave, which makes products including Silk soy milk and Rachel’s yogurt, has a cafeteria straight out of a fairy tale hatched by an idealistic foodie.
We’ll have a cafeteria full of organic and local food, dreams the romantic, rubbing his hands together. The company will subsidize the meals, so regular workers can afford them. Chefs will rarely open boxes or cans; instead they will make everything from scratch.
But White Wave is no utopian reverie.
White Wave’s mess hall is run by Bon Appetit Management, a food-service company in northern California that imposes strict standards on its clients, many of them college campuses, including Colorado College in Colorado Springs. It manages 400 cafeterias in 29 states, serving about 200,000 people a day.
Among the standards: All salad dressings are made from scratch; trans fats are forbidden; salmon is wild-caught (never farmed); turkey and beef are roasted in-house daily for deli meats; salsas, pizza sauce, marinara and other sauces are homemade in the cafeteria kitchen.
In addition, Bon Appetit has committed itself to reducing its “carbon footprint,” says White Wave cafeteria manager Kelly McBride. So virtually nothing arrives from farther away than North America, with most ingredients the White Wave cafeteria uses coming from Colorado or at least the West.
“Any food that travels by air takes over 10 times as much oil as by boat,” says Maisie Greenawalt, a Bon Appetit executive. “Agriculture is responsible for one-third of global greenhouse emissions. With the typical American, your choice of food has greater impact on climate change than your car.”
This thinking has changed the way the company buys fish. No longer is it flown in fresh. Now, it’s either caught from local waters and purchased locally, or it’s frozen at sea and shipped to U.S. ports. And the volume of beef prepared in the cafeterias was slashed by 10 percent companywide last year.
At White Wave, about 300 people a day file into the spacious, light-filled cafeteria, stopping en route to check out the list of daily specials. On the way to the food, they pass “Composting Central,” where they are encouraged to dump their compostable utensils and scraps. Bonus: A few times a year, a truck full of garden-ready compost pulls up to White Wave; employees bring buckets and bags to take home the garden gold.
A smattering of recent specials at the White Wave cafeteria: roasted top sirloin with new red potatoes and grilled squash ($6.25); blackened chicken with Creole sauce, dirty rice, and fried okra ($5.99); wild mushroom-encrusted striped bass with Spanish sausage and cannellini beans ($5.95).
There are waffles and eggs Benedict and multigrain pancakes with fresh fruit on some mornings; sometimes an Indian buffet at lunch. There is a panini and pizza bar; an espresso and smoothie station; a grill where the hamburgers are usually from Colorado cows, the pork from Weld County and the lamb from Fort Collins; and a rotating selection of soups — carrot cashew, gazpacho, tomato bisque, New England clam chowder — made by hand, right down to the stock.
A group of chefs prepares all of it in the cafe’s sleek kitchen, where the stainless steel pots and utensils hang from racks and are so shiny you could stare at a saute pan and check your makeup; where people in white jackets and black-and-white pants rush here and there, lugging sacks of potatoes from southern Colorado, chopping carrots grown in Longmont, and crumbling blue cheese made in Fort Collins; where the soup pot is half the size of a hot tub.
Tonya Selbee, 29, a White Wave executive, says she began celebrating the day the company opened the cafeteria about two years ago. Before the cafeteria, employees tended to hit the closest places to eat — a Wendy’s and a deli — or they brown-bagged it.
“I would never pack my lunch now,” says Selbee, polishing off a slice of pizza with a side of sauteed Colorado zucchini. “When my husband visits, we never go out for lunch. We just come here. It’s that good.”
Richter, who went to cooking school and has worked for restaurants, says he “swore I would never go corporate. I was just against it.”
But then, about a decade ago a friend suggested he check out Bon Appetit, which ran a cafeteria for Hewlett-Packard in Fort Collins.
The company, he says, “opened my eyes to what you can do in a corporate setting.”
When he hires new employees, he looks for people with restaurant, versus “corporate feeding,” experience, he says.
“We make our own refried beans, from dried beans,” he says. “People come in and say, ‘Where’s the can?’ ”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
