The quick way to cater an event is with compostables. Grab a sleeve of cups, hot and cold, toss them in the pack, and you’re done. Nobody has to wash anything, and nobody has to haul anything home. It’s what most of the industry does, and honestly, it’s tempting.
But once we decided as a company to stop adding to the trash stream wherever we possibly could, the easy way stopped being an option. So we set a simple rule: no single-use items whenever possible. That means no sugar packets, no little creamers, none of it. At the bar it’s glass or aluminum, never plastic. When we serve a meal, it’s china plates, real flatware and cloth napkins.
It isn’t always an easy sell. Those items usually have to be rented, and that’s a line on the budget clients notice. But we believe the small decisions we make every day add up to real change.
A few years ago we catered a climate conference at Al Gore’s ranch in Tennessee. Recycling options in the area were limited at the time, so the team collected every bit of recycling from the event and hauled it across state lines to a facility that would take it. When I asked one of the staff about it, she said it was never a question of “should we do it.” It was only ever “how do we do it.”
That stuck with me, and it’s become how we approach every event.
Recently, a couple and their planner wanted to go all compostable for the wedding after-party, cups to forks. “This is how everyone does it, Dee,” the planner told me. We don’t, so we offered to cover the cost of renting the glassware and plates ourselves. Not “should we,” just “how.”
The result: this season we catered hundreds of weddings, corporate events and celebrations across Marin, San Francisco and Wine Country, and reached for compostables fewer than five times.
We’re not perfect. NoHungerHere, the meal program we started during COVID, still delivers food to folks on the street in compostable containers, because for now we haven’t found another way to make that work, and we keep thinking about it. One thing we have figured out: starting in 2027, our quarterly Seeds of Hope Lunch, where we serve a hot meal to hundreds of unhoused neighbors, moves to real plates and forks. It’s been on our minds for a while, and now’s the time.
If you’d like to help make that switch happen, or help us keep feeding our neighbors, you can make a donation to NoHungerHere. A portion of every event we cater already goes to the program, and every gift helps.
Every event raises the same question, and the answer is always the same: we figure out how.
Planning a wedding, corporate event or holiday party? Let’s talk about your event →