Catering & Sustainability

Ah, the wedding food—delicious cocktail hour bites, full family-style, sit-down meals, desserts galore…we love it! Everyone looks forward to this part of a wedding, but its unfortunately one area that has huge potential for waste.

So many times, unseasonal foods are served and leftovers are thrown out when there are much more sustainable ways to cater an event.

To get more information and advice on how to spot a sustainable caterer, catering “red flags”, and the importance of sustainability in catering, we chatted with a few of NYC’s most eco-friendly caterers: STE Events, Chef Cava, and Oak & Honey Catering.

Chef Cava’s spring farm spread

Oak and Honey’s cocktail hour spread

Red flags

If you come across any of these, it is probably a sign that caterer is not implementing sustainable practices.

1. Huge menus: Every menu should be personalized & seasonal to each client. If you have tons of options for food from different seasons (think asparagus, tomatoes, and cucumbers on the menu for a winter wedding), that is not sustainable.

2. Buffets: As great as buffets are for making sure guests can eat as little or as much as they want, they also lend themselves really well to waste. Buffets force the caterer to guess what will be most popular and how much of each dish to make. “For a 200 person party, that can be pretty alarming,” says Oak & Honey Catering’s founder, Zach Mayer.

3. Set seafood options: Seafood availability changes daily and is hugely impacted by the season and even the weather that week. If a caterer promises your favorite seafood year-round, that is not a good sign.

4. Replicating menus: No two menus should be the same! A sustainable caterer will source different foods from local farmers for each event, and the same exact options will never be the same for two different events.

STE Events’ personalized & seasonal menu for Alexa & Scott’s summer wedding.

Questions to ask

When you’re searching for the perfect caterer, ask these questions to figure out if they are sustainability-minded:

1. What do you do to combat food waste? Any sustainable caterer will have multiple answers for you off the top of their head.

2. What do you do with leftovers at the end of the night? One great and easy option is to give the leftovers to catering staff and event vendors.

3. Do you compost? Anything that can be composted, should be composted!

4. What percentage of your ingredients come from local farmers? This number should be pretty high.

The quality of meals that sustainable caterers produce is much higher than that of non-sustainable caterers. The food is literally farm to table and seasonally appropriate—and there’s nothing better!

This was STE’s final product at Alexa & Scott’s Green Building Wedding.

Ways You Can Participate in Catering Sustainability

Be flexible in your menu & trust your caterer. They will provide you with the best possible menu of the seasonally available items. Asking for foods that aren’t local or in-season is asking to be unsustainable.

1. Choose a plated dinner over buffet or family style. This allows your caterer to really hone in on your guest count and not over-cook.

2. Don’t ask your caterer to make enough for leftovers. As Chef Cava puts it, this is one of the worst things a sustainable caterer can hear.