By Sara Perez Webber
Focus on your trash. It may sound unsexy, but it’s a game-changing place to start if you’re serious about making your catering business more sustainable in 2026.
That’s one of the tips from Steve Short, a longtime sustainability expert who’s the COO of the Steve Short Culinary Team and Atlasta Catering in Phoenix, and a member of the CFE News advisory board. CFE News asked Short for the practical guidance he’d give other caterers looking to make meaningful sustainability changes in the new year.
“When I consult with people, I always start with waste,” says Short, adding that at his company, waste goes into “loss” bins, not “trash” bins. “As soon as you start driving a metric toward something, you want to rename it. I get people out of the mentality of ‘trash’ or ‘throwing away.’”
His point goes beyond trash—or loss. In Short’s view, sustainability isn’t a one-time initiative. It’s an operating philosophy that requires thoughtful, focused actions day in and day out.
“When I first got into sustainability, I honestly thought that it was a checklist, and if I finished the checklist, I would be sustainable,” says Short. “But a sustainable organization is one that makes progress every day in multiple modules. It’s a different way of doing business.”
Here are Short’s most actionable tips for caterers who want to build a more sustainable operation in 2026—without getting paralyzed by perfection.
Tip 1: Measure Your Loss
If you want to reduce the amount of waste your company generates, you first need to understand how much you produce.
“You start by taking a look at what you’re throwing away,” says Short. “And in the beginning, it’s everything, right? But you systematically start taking those pieces away.”
For Steve Short Culinary Team, it took six-and-a-half years to get where they wanted to be. “In my organization, we’re down to 300 to 400 pounds [of waste] a week,” says Short, whose company produces between 60 and 80 events a week. “That might sound like a lot to a really small deli, but for a full, comprehensive brand, it’s almost nothing.”
Tip 2: Make It Easy for Your Staff
At Short’s company, not only are “trash” bins renamed “loss” bins, but they’re also designed to minimize waste. “We have these big, beautiful separation stations,” he says. “They’re very accessible, and we train our employees on their use.”
By removing the easy “throw-it-out” option, the sustainable choice becomes the only choice.
Tip 3: Understand What’s Possible in Your City—Then Drive Excellence
Infrastructure varies across cities, so how you deal with waste may differ from a caterer in another locale. “Each municipality is different,” notes Short. “Some have recycling programs. Some don’t.” For example, in Phoenix, there’s no composting program.
His recommendation for 2026: Learn the rules where you are, then out-execute everyone. “First, find out what you can recycle in the area that you’re in,” Short advises. “Budget for it, then make sure you have the best recycling of anybody in the city. If your area only recycles cardboard, be the best cardboard recycler.”
Make sure your recycling is clean, stresses Short: “We drive excellence into our recycling program, because that’s where we started. And the impact it had on the stuff that was going over to our landfill was tremendous.”
Tip 4: Create a System for Excess Food
Leftover food is a much bigger challenge in catering than it is in restaurants, as caterers often over-produce to avoid running out at an event. So sustainably minded caterers must have a plan for responsibly disposing of the excess.
Short recommends tackling the issue with a decision tree, which he employs at his business:
- Feed humans first. Short’s catering brands always have refrigerated units at their events, so prepared food is kept at the proper temperature. They then work with a local organization—Waste Not—which picks up the excess food and distributes it to nonprofits, feeding people in need. In the last 13 years, Atlasta has donated over 1 million pounds of food—or 600,000 meals.
- Feed animals not for slaughter. The Steve Short Culinary Team also collects food scraps and delivers them to a local farm, feeding chickens that produce eggs. “Get some beautiful barrels, put them in your walk-in coolers, and fill that up with all of your trim waste or anything coming off of your buffets,” Short recommends. “Make sure it’s the purest food you’ve ever seen, with no plastic or waste in there, so you have pure feed to give the farmer.” The volumes can be significant: “We produce about five tons a week from our kitchens that go out to the farm.”
- Compost to soil when available. Since composting isn’t available in Phoenix, Short’s companies don’t do any direct composting. But he recommends composting excess food if that’s an option in your market.
Tip 5: Let Sustainability Shape Purchasing
Once caterers start measuring loss and building a culture around waste reduction, purchasing decisions begin to change naturally.
That might include choosing chicken raised without antibiotics, reducing food miles by prioritizing regional suppliers over global ones when possible, and rethinking single-use items in favor of reusable china and silver.
The key, Short stresses, is not perfection—but intention. Some items may need to be sourced farther afield, such as bananas and coffee. “You do the best you can,” says Short. “But if you’re transparent and flexible with your team, it will all start happening.”
Tip 6: Treat Sustainability as an Employee Retention Strategy
For Short, sustainability isn’t just an environmental initiative—it’s a people strategy.
“After you pay people well, what makes people proud of where they work? People are proud when a brand does what they say they are going to do,” he stresses.
That connection has real financial impact. Higher retention means less recruiting, less retraining and more experienced teams executing events. In fact, Short’s company avoids temporary workers because “you can’t drive the same culture into temp staff as you can with fully employed staff.” That involves a lot of advance planning for Short’s team of about 120 employees, but he finds the trade-off worth it.
Every morning starts with a staff meeting, and every event starts with a pre-shift meeting. “We do a family meal together at every event in every facility,” says Short. “That’s sustainability, too—this culture of communication, of transparency, of sharing food together and having conversations.”
The 2026 Takeaway: Start Somewhere, Then Keep Going
Ultimately, says Short, sustainability is an evolution.
“You’re not a failure if you haven’t gotten started, and you’re not a failure if you’re 20 years in and you still don’t have all the answers,” he says. “Every day, we improve. We’re not the same sustainable company we were 10 years ago. It’s a complex business, but it’s a great journey.”
