Maisie Ganzler Dishes on When and How Corporate Animal Welfare Policies Work

Maisie Ganzler has never worked at an animal welfare charity nor an alt-protein company. Yet she's in the upper echelon of effectiveness when it comes to reducing the suffering of farmed animals. That's because she's served as an executive of a national food management company supplying 1,000 schools and corporate dining facilities, Bon Appetit Management Company, for decades. In her career, Maisie pioneered some of the first-ever corporate policies to require suppliers to stop using battery cages for laying hens and gestation crates for breeding pigs, meat reduction policies, and a whole host of other important animal welfare and sustainability initiatives.

When Bon Appetit would implement a policy like those mentioned, it was often seen as leading edge at the time, yet eventually would become the norm among food service companies. For example, Bon Appetit's 2005 cage-free egg policy would come to be adopted by McDonald's a decade later. Maisie even ran for McDonald's board of directors, backed by billionaire Carl Icahn, a campaign she writes that the fast food company spent $16 million to defeat. While she didn't make it onto McDonald's board, Maisie does sit on the board of directors of an alt-protein company called Air Protein, whose CEO Lisa Dyson has been a guest on this show before!

So it was with great pleasure that I learned that Maisie has come out with her first book, which is part autobiography and part guide for others on how to create meaningful change in our food and agricultural system. The book, which just recently came out, is called You Can't Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company. I read it and found it both informational, inspirational, and entertaining. What more could you want?

Well, maybe you'd want to hear Maisie's story straight from her rather than from me, so enjoy this conversation with a true pioneer for animals, farm workers, and everyone who wants to build a better food system.

Discussed in this episode

• Josh Balk worked with Maisie on many animal welfare policies, and now runs The Accountability Board.

• David Benzaquen was a student who in 2005 helped catalyze Bon Appetit's cage-free policy, and who now is an executive in the plant-based food industry.

• Maisie discusses the difficulties implementing the Better Chicken Commitment, leading Compassion in World Farming to extend its deadline for compliance. You can read more in CIWF's 2023 Chicken Track paper.

• Maisie recommends reading Civil Eats and the NRA Smart Brief.

• Our past episode with Resetting the Table author Robert Paarlberg.

• Walker Hayes' song Fancy Like has 146 million YouTube views, so it's not just Maisie and Paul who like it.

More about Maisie Ganzler

Maisie Ganzler is the go-to expert on how companies can make positive change in supply chains and other entrenched systems. She's been interviewed by leading media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Fast Company, and Bloomberg, spoken at conferences around the world, written thought leadership pieces for Forbes, Huffington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle and is frequently called upon for strategic counsel by start-ups and big business alike.

As Chief Strategy & Brand Officer for Bon Appetit Management Company, a $1.7 billion onsite restaurant company with 1,000-plus cafés at corporations, universities, and cultural institutions in 33 states serving more than 250 million meals per year, Maisie tackled local purchasing, antibiotics in meat production, sustainable seafood, humane care of farm animals, climate change, farmworkers' rights, and food waste, positioning the company as the foodservice industry's undisputed leader in sustainable purchasing and holistic wellness.

She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.