When you think about sustainable wedding catering, you probably picture beautiful plates of mains, salads and vegetables arriving at perfectly dressed tables. And, thankfully, there is plenty of that. What you don’t necessarily see is everything that happens behind the scenes: the planning, chopping, lifting, tasting, washing up and, most importantly, the many hands it takes to get a wedding dinner onto the table.
Ready for action!
Weddings are wonderful occasions, but they can also be resource-intensive. With large numbers of guests, complicated logistics and so many different elements to coordinate, it’s easy for food and materials to be ordered in excess, ingredients to be used once and waste to build up. From food and packaging to flowers, decorations and transport, the environmental footprint of a wedding can be surprisingly large. The scale of wedding food waste is pretty striking: a study reported by The Guardian found that around a tenth of wedding food was thrown away, amounting to almost £500 worth for the average celebration. It’s not exactly breaking news (the article is a few years old now), but we think the point still stands.
We try hard to reduce the impact of the weddings we cater here in Scotland. For almost all of our 2026 weddings – all bar two – couples have chosen our Even Greener Menu, which is built around Scottish seasonal produce, surplus ingredients from local suppliers and keeping waste to a minimum. Rather than deciding months in advance exactly what will be on every plate, they’re happy to let our chefs work with what’s available and at its best.
“The ethos of the company was what first attracted us to them, as we loved the goal of minimising waste, so we opted for their Even Greener Menu.”
For us, though, sustainability doesn’t stop with the ingredients or how they are packaged. It also means thinking about who is in the kitchen cooking them.
For this wedding, M’Jay came back to help with the prep after previously completing a placement with Edinburgh Food Social. He slipped straight back into the kitchen, chopping, prepping and getting stuck in as if he’d never been away. We also brought two local people into paid roles across the kitchen and front of house. Both had volunteered with us previously, while Dylan came through our Young Apprenticeship Scheme. Seeing Dylan step into a paid role at a wedding is exactly the kind of thing we want our catering work to make possible.
Events like this help us create opportunities for people to gain skills, experience and paid employment, alongside the food education work we do in Craigmillar and Niddrie. For us, a more sustainable approach to catering is about people as well as produce: creating opportunities within our local community while making thoughtful choices about the food we serve.
Vegans can have fun too!
The menu itself was designed to be inclusive too. Dietary requirements were carefully considered, with sharing dishes created so that guests with different dietary needs could eat together rather than being handed an entirely separate meal. We pride ourselves on doing this by usual the best seasonal Scottish produce that we can find.
“Our guests with dietary requirements felt really taken care of, and were so pleased many of them could eat the sharing dishes together with the rest of the table.”
Marius takes weddings very seriously…
And, importantly, sustainable doesn’t have to mean boring salads. The menu included a heritage carrot tarte tatin alongside plenty of other seasonal dishes, and the couple described the dinner as “impeccable”, telling us that so many guests said it was the best wedding food they’d ever had. The chocolate mousse with honeycomb was a particular hit, while later in the evening, the bright pink beetroot mac and cheese buffet arrived.
“It was the perfect way to fuel people for lots of dancing.”
Of course, we still care about all the things you’d expect from wedding caterers. We want the food to be delicious, the tables to look beautiful and everyone to leave very well fed. But we think catering an event can be about more than simply getting food from our kitchen to your guests. It can be an opportunity to make thoughtful use of ingredients, celebrate what’s in season, reduce waste, create paid work and give people the chance to build skills and experience.
Getting married? Invite us! If you want your catering to be delicious, thoughtful and a little kinder to the planet, we’d love to hear from you. From our Even Greener Menu to the people we employ and the communities we support, your wedding can help do good without compromising on the food.
