What It Actually Means to Be a Carbon-Neutral Caterer

You've probably seen "sustainable" used to describe everything from paper straws to vague commitments about sourcing. In the catering industry, the word gets applied so freely that it has started to mean very little. We'd like to explain what we actually mean when we say it — and what distinguishes a genuine commitment from a marketing position.

Purslane is New York City's first Scope 3 certified carbon-neutral caterer. That's a specific claim, and it's worth unpacking.

What Scope 3 means

Carbon emissions are categorized into three scopes. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from operations — fuel burned in a company's vehicles, for example. Scope 2 covers purchased energy, like electricity. Scope 3 is everything else: the emissions embedded in your supply chain, your ingredients, your packaging, your vendors, and the transportation that gets all of it to you.

Most organizations that claim carbon neutrality are working with Scope 1 and 2 — their own direct footprint. Scope 3 is harder to measure and significantly harder to offset, which is why most organizations don't bother. It typically accounts for the majority of a food company's total emissions, because so much of the environmental impact of food happens before it ever reaches a kitchen.

Our Scope 3 certification, verified through our partnership with Zero Foodprint, means we've accounted for and offset the full carbon impact of our business — including our entire supply chain. We invest in regenerative agriculture and other carbon capture projects across the United States and globally to ensure that what we do, from farm to fork to compost bin, nets out.

Why it matters that we work with regional farms

Certification alone isn't the whole picture. The more fundamental reason our carbon footprint is manageable is that we source the majority of our ingredients from farms within 200 miles of New York City — Satur Farms on the North Fork, Stokes Farm in New Jersey, Norwich Meadows Farm in upstate New York, and others. Shorter supply chains mean less transportation, fresher ingredients, and a direct relationship with the people growing our food. We can ask questions about how soil is managed, what inputs are used, and how workers are treated. Those aren't questions you can easily ask of an industrial distributor.

What zero waste looks like at an event

Carbon neutrality addresses emissions; zero waste addresses what happens to materials. At every Purslane event, we handle composting and recycling on-site. Nothing goes to landfill. Our drop-off catering uses compostable containers and utensils through our partnership with noissue — no plastic packaging, no single-use items that will outlast the event by centuries. When we have surplus ingredients that don't meet our presentation standards, we donate them to CHiPS, a food pantry in Park Slope that has been serving our neighborhood since 1971.

None of this is something you need to think about as a client. It happens in the background, as a standard part of how we work, not as an add-on or an upgrade.

Why we're part of NYC's Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge

As a signatory to New York City's Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge, we've committed to reducing our food-related carbon footprint by 25% by 2030. The most direct path to that goal is through what's on the plate: plant-forward menus that feature vegetables, legumes, and grains prominently, with animal proteins used more selectively. This isn't a constraint — it's one of the things that makes our menus interesting. A vegetable-forward approach, built on seasonal ingredients at peak quality, tends to produce more varied and memorable food than a protein-centered one.

What this means for your event

If you're planning a corporate event, gala, or wedding and sustainability is part of your organization's values or your own — or if you simply want to avoid the cognitive dissonance of hosting a beautiful event that generates a pile of landfill waste — Purslane is the only caterer in New York who can offer full-spectrum accountability for what your event costs the planet.

We're happy to walk through our approach in detail, or to provide documentation for events that require it. We also offer TRUE for Events certification, which gives clients official documentation of their event's zero-waste status.

To learn more about our approach, visit our Conscious Catering page. To start planning an event, get in touch.