Sustainable Catering

Sustainable catering provides an opportunity for function organisers to reduce the environmental impact of their event. This can be achieved by providing sustainable food, minimising waste and passing on uneaten food to charities.

Sustainable food

Plan your work event menus to include sustainable food choices.  These include:

• Buying local produce, in season and fresh. See our our local food directory for suppliers.

• Having vegetarian and vegan options

• Using organic and Fair Trade ingredients and products where possible. These are available at the following stores:

  • Beach Road Milk - New Plymouth. Supplying local unpasteurized milk direct from the farm. Their farm store also stocks items from Loveys Free Range Eggs, The Blueberry Patch, Villa Bumblebee and Kaitake Farm.

  • Bin Inn Waitara - Waitara. Bin Inn offer a wide range of wholefoods and organic supplies.

  • Down to Earth - New Plymouth. Down to Earth provide a wide range of the organic foods and products, with fresh produce delivered Tuesdays and Fridays

  • Trade Aid - some products are also available in supermarkets

  • Supermarkets - your local supermarket has an ever growing number of organic, free range, local and fair trade items.

Catering Supplies

There are a number of consumable that can be avoided and replaced by reusable items. Ask your caterer to provide:

• Reusable cutlery and crockery.  Where disposable items must be used, ensure they are made of renewable and/or recyclable content e.g. bamboo cutlery

• Jugs of tap water rather than bottled water

• Linen napkins and tablecloths.  If not available ask for recycled content paper napkins

• Condiments to be served in dishes rather an individually packaged portions.

Local suppliers of compostable and recyclable disposable items include:

• Hardy Packaging

• Pack Centre

Local caterers who tell us they are committed to using reusable cutlery, crockery and paxckagain, or compostable products where single use items are required, include:

• The Public Catering Company

• ABC Catering

• Backyard Catering - Hawera

• CaterMe

• Delistar Catering

• KDJ Catering

• Le Dejeuner Catering

• L'Epicure - Creative Catering

• Metro Café-Catering Ltd - Stratford

Reducing, recycling, composting and gifting

Events are often highly disposable affairs. There are a number of things you can do to reduce wastage.

• Provide dry erase marker pens and encourage participants to label and reuse their glasses and mugs during the event.

• Ask the venue managers to provide recycling bins for the event and promote recycling with attendees.

• Ask the caterer to package leftover food for donation to local food charities. Our Food For Free page lists places that will collect and distribute spare food to those in need.

• If the food is not suitable for gifting, have it collected for composting.

If you know of other stockists/retailers/suppliers/services or all round fantastic sustainable sources please let us know so that we can include them here.