Embedding Sustainability at Thomas Preti Events to Savor

Since 1987, Thomas Preti Events to Savor has seamlessly orchestrated thousands of events at New York's most prestigious venues. Their team has earned a reputation for delivering an unmatched culinary experience and first class service by tailoring the needs of each event to enhance its unique image and style.

Tommy Preti Jr, Administrative Director, and Executive Chef Chris Tonti created the organization's Green Team to reimagine their culinary philosophy and embed sustainability into every part of the business.

Tommy and Chef Tonti discuss their initiatives, creating a cross functional green team, the importance of partnerships, and taking one step at a time.

Chef Chris Tonti (left) and Tommy Preti Jr.

Just to start us off, what’s something that comes to mind about sustainable food in NYC?

Chef Tonti: For me, it’s partnering with urban farms that are in the city. There are vertical mushroom farms, rooftop farms, and Gotham Greens.

I think very few people, including myself, have visited a vertical mushroom farm. What was your experience walking in there?

Chef Tonti: It’s dark (laughs). Not quite what I expected. I expected brightly lit greenhouses. But they’re mostly dark and damp, with vertical grow lights, and carts and shelves row after row to make the most of the cubic footage.

Tommy: It’s not what we typically think of as farming. There are many ways to farm, and that's the most interesting part about urban farms. Obviously there aren’t huge plots of land and dirt and soil in New York City, but we can get around that with techniques like hydroponics and aquaponics. It’s really innovative, and it changes your perception of what farming is.

Chef Tonti: Imagine water lines misting everywhere. I was in Gotham Greens years ago, they’re constantly misting the whole room. They turn the misters off when you walk in, but it’s just wet leaves everywhere.

That kind of “mist irrigation” probably saves a lot of water.

Tommy: 100%. And rather than runoff, which happens at a traditional farm, they can recirculate the water, so it's much more efficient from that standpoint, too.

Chef Tonti: You don't have to worry about runoff from other farms contaminating your farm, and they don’t have to use pesticides, because it's a controlled environment. It's a completely different ballgame.

Tommy: One of the most exciting things for us is shrinking the distance from the food source to our kitchen and to our events. In fact, we’ve partnered with dozens of local farms less than 250 miles from the city. And that really minimizes our carbon footprint.

Chef Tonti: All the vertical farms we work with in the city, I order by 2pm, they cut it that night, and it’s delivered in the morning. It’s freshly harvested, and they start growing more the next day.

And they can grow year round because it’s not dependent on the seasons.

Tommy: Exactly. The issue with our industrial farming system is monoculture farming where just one crop, like corn, is all that’s grown on a massive piece of land all year. It’s not good for the soil or for the crops. But to your point, when we're talking about indoor farms, that's not a factor.

Chef Tonti: One of our partners is Smallhold mushroom farm, and typically when you think of extravagant mushrooms, you think morels for a certain season, and chanterelles for a certain season, and oysters in certain seasons. Smallhold now offers five mushrooms year round and we designed them into our menus because they’re consistently available. If there's a big enough event, I can give them a month’s heads up and they specifically grow for that, and it takes them a couple of weeks and that’s it.

Link to Blog Post: Vertical Farming in the Big Apple

Tommy: Another one of our partners is the Billion Oyster Project who we joined up with last year to collect leftover oyster shells after our events and recirculate them in New York’s waterways, which is critical to revitalize the marine ecosystems around New York City. 

The goal is to rebuild the oyster population, which has been decimated over the last few decades. The theory is, if we can restore the oyster population around New York Harbor back to above one billion oysters, they’d be able to filter all of the water flowing through New York City’s waters. The Billion Oyster Project is just another way that we're learning from and getting involved with awesome partners in this area.

How do the oysters come back?

Tommy: We give them our leftover shells and they treat them for a number of months and reintroduce them into the water, which does a few important things. Oyster larvae need a place to live, so these shells support the growth of their population. Adult oysters naturally filter a huge amount of water, and these shells also help create reefs that attract and protect other marine wildlife. The reefs also protect the coastlines as sort of a natural storm barrier. If we can rebuild the oyster population, we can restore the ecosystem and we'll start to see all these different benefits.

I hope that participating restaurants put QR codes on their menus that explain their “used” oysters shells are being “repurposed” for positive impact.

Tommy: Totally, education is such an important part of it. And it shows that doing something a little differently can make a positive impact. Our company has been around for 36 years and we never even thought about putting our oyster shells in a bucket to bring back with us after an event, rather than just chucking them in another bucket: the trash (laughs). We just didn't know there was another way, and then we found the Billion Oysters Project. They gave us these blue collection buckets, and we send them to every event that we serve oysters at. So instead of putting our shells in one bucket, we put them in this blue one instead. It’s been so much easier than we thought to change and adjust because there are solutions out there.

I bet your staff is happy to be a part of the Billion Oyster Project?

Chef Tonti: Yes, very excited.

Link to Blog Post: A Drop in the (Blue) Bucket to Restore NY Harbor

Tommy: One of the big things for us, coming out of COVID and thinking about rebuilding our company, we realized that we had a one-time chance to make some big core changes to how we do things. Right up there for us was becoming a more sustainable business, and embedding sustainability throughout the entire company. Not just on the food sourcing side, but in everything we do.  

That was the origin of the Green Team, which includes one member from each team across our company to represent all the different perspectives. We wanted to make sure that the changes we wanted to make, and the initiatives we undertake, are well thought out and take everything into account, so that they’re the most effective and can be communicated back out to everyone else.

We try to incorporate everyone in the process, because challenges like the environment and climate change are so, so big, and as individuals there’s not really much we can do to move the needle. But to be a part of a larger organization that’s really pushing in one particular direction, that’s how you start to see the needle move. That’s why we're excited to be part of MUSE, because we can take our organization, and team up with even more organizations, and I think that's really the path that we're gonna start to see bigger change in the years to come.

Shifting to a more sustainable business must feel scary and messy at first.  Can you elaborate on what it felt like when you started your green team versus now?

Tommy: In 2019 we started having conversations about sustainability in a more serious way. We would have sustainability meetings with whoever was interested in talking about it, which was a start, and we started learning a lot.

The challenge we had in 2019 was how to make sustainability not a side project, or this “nice initiative" that we're doing for marketing, but how to really embed it in who we are. One silver lining that came out of COVID for us was this one-time opportunity to rethink core things about ourselves, and rebuild, from a place that, knock-on-wood, we’ll never have to rebuild from again. 

The first step was actually taking a step back to define what sustainability means for us. It’s such a buzzy word, which is good from an awareness standpoint, but trendy words can lose a lot of their nuance and meaning. We spent a lot of time talking about what sustainability meant specifically for our company and getting on the same page about that. We ended up defining sustainability as, “being conscious of all the different ways our company impacts the world around us, and baking that awareness into everything we do”. That’s become our working definition.

Our mantra from the beginning was the old Chinese proverb, ‘a journey of 1,000 miles starts with one step’ because at first it was really daunting looking up at this mountain in front of us and deciding where to begin. Everyone wants to jump right away to, “how can we become carbon neutral?” But one of our biggest strengths, and our biggest successes, has been taking it one step at a time. We don't have to solve all the world's problems on today's call or at tonight's event.  

We started using the phrase “low hanging fruit.”  What are the things sitting there for us to, relatively easily, cross them off, and make a change? Let's just keep our focus on the next lowest hanging fruit. And that way it's so much more manageable, and we don't get overwhelmed by this massive undertaking. I'm really proud that we’ve stayed focused on just taking one step at a time rather than being thrown off by the scope of these challenges we face.

So a big source of that success has been including at least one representative from each team of our company. From sales and marketing through our operation staff, to our culinary team, and our warehouse. This way, all corners of the company can be looked at and scrutinized so that there are as few blind spots as possible. For instance, having our Warehouse Manager, Luis, be involved has been instrumental in helping us to eliminate single use plastic items from our inventory. 

What has been the current low hanging fruit?

Chef Tonti: One thing on the agenda at our first meeting of this year was replacing some of our single use plastic snack bags. The clear, presentable bags are pretty sexy. So we’re looking at paper bag options with logos.

What has been one of your biggest achievements?

Tommy: I would say our biggest accomplishment of 2022 was becoming a certified plastic neutral catering facility. That's something we're really proud of, and something we put a ton of work into. As a matter of fact, we became the first caterer in our market to be officially plastic neutral certified. 

How did you do this?  What was the process?

Tommy: We spent the first half of the year pretty much going through our entire inventory of plastics, and switching over to compostable or reusable or infinitely recyclable alternatives. After we slashed our overall plastic footprint as much as we could, we spent the second half of the year measuring our remaining plastic usage. We did this by collecting all the plastic that passed through our kitchen, warehouse, and office and weighing it to calculate what our actual plastic footprint was.

From there we partnered with Clean Hub, an organization that connects businesses with plastic collection hubs primarily in developing countries around the world. They linked us up with the No Trash Triangle Initiative in Indonesia, which is one of the most biodiverse environments on the planet. And what they do is focus on collecting plastic that hasn’t been discarded properly and rescuing it before it has the chance to enter the ocean. So we’re able to sponsor the No Trash Triangle and offset our footprint by removing plastic pollution pound for pound from the shorelines.

Link to Blog Post: Earth Day 2023: Plastic Neutral Update

It must have been daunting to collect and measure the plastic?

Tommy: I’ll give Chef a ton of credit for this because he came at it from such a “can-do” mentality. The most challenging piece is probably in Chef's kitchen. When we were first discussing the idea about a year ago, I don't know if the word “impossible” was used, but it was things like “we could never do that, it will never work. It's just way too complicated to ever figure out” (laughs). But Chef was unwavering and confident that we'd find a way. It’s another great example of how once we rolled up our sleeves to work on something, we realized it wasn’t as “impossible” as we might have thought. It’s more a change of habits and little tweaks here and there. And just being a little bit more conscious about what we're doing.

Chef Tonti: The first few days were good practice, and once we got the ball rolling, and everyone gradually understood what we were doing, and why, they got excited about it.

When you said that you wanted to embed sustainability into every part of your business, how did you make those decisions? Where did you start?

Chef Tonti: We basically get together and “Town Hall” it every other week. We all throw ideas at the wall, we write them down, we look at what we can achieve at the moment versus what might be more of a future thing, and we work on the lowest hanging fruit. Outside our meetings, when we notice things and say, "oh, that's probably not great,” we then bring it to the table. 

Can you describe specific challenges, and how you manage to overcome them?

Tommy: One that’s top of mind is our Design Team that produces decor elements for our events. We can spend weeks and months planning for just one night, and sometimes we’re fabricating custom items specifically for that one night. But what do you do with that afterwards? This was something we brought to our Green Team table and eventually we discovered Materials for the Arts (MFTA), which is an organization based right here in Long Island City. What they do is an awesome concept called “creative reuse.” Pretty much whatever decor items we have, we can donate them to MFTA and they make them available to local arts programs, artists, schools, and different community programs. So instead of sending them to the trash, and ultimately to a landfill, they’re recirculated back into our community for all different creative projects. So much of our focus goes into the planning process, but we’ve really tried to add an approach that looks at the entire lifecycle, including what happens after the event.

Link To Blog Post: One Events Trash in Another’s Masterpiece

Most of the flashy sustainability efforts, at least from a business standpoint, tend to be geared toward the upfront event planning process, like food sourcing, menu development, things like that. Don't get me wrong, that’s critical to this puzzle. But everyone in the events industry knows that rush at the end of the night breaking down, strike, loadout. If there's no consciousness there, you're really only looking at half of the picture.

We’ve also partnered with Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC) so now our leftovers can be donated to those experiencing food insecurity. And we're making sure food and other organic byproducts are composted instead of ending up in landfill. It’s mostly the inputs to our culinary, design, packaging that get the buzz, but what about our outputs? We’re trying to look holistically at what we do.

What’s the feedback from clients been like?

Chef Tonti: As we started making progress on a lot of these initiatives, we kept track of our accomplishments. And now we have this overview page that goes in front of all our menus, it’s the first thing our clients see. We started hearing that clients choose us over another caterer because of our sustainability focus. And over the last few years we've been hearing this over and over again.  

Tommy: Yeah, in our industry, we say that great food is really just the price of entry. I don't think either ourselves, or our competitors, would be able to succeed in this market if we weren't serving excellent food. But layering in conscious food sourcing, and what’s gone into preparing and transporting the food, that transparency elevates it to a whole other level. It’s clear that we put a ton of thought and design into every single bite that our clients and their guests are having at their event.

This really speaks to the business case for sustainability.  Embedding sustainability, more often than not, results in a positive impact on business performance.

Tommy: I love that you mentioned the business case for sustainable events. The game changer for us is embedding sustainability into our overall operations, as opposed to treating it like a side project where anything that costs money or takes extra effort is looked at as detracting from the bottom line. When you really reframe it and start to look at the business case, it actually strengthens our business in so many ways.

What’s something else that you have embedded?

Chef Tonti: The big project we took on last summer was ethical protein sourcing. We began with seafood, specifically shrimp. We get fair trade, wild Mexican blue shrimp from a company called Del Pacifico. It also happens to be the best tasting shrimp we’re ever offered. And from there, we took a look at all the fish and seafood that was on our menus. We wrote it all down, and went to our suppliers and kind of grilled them on the sources. Where's it coming from? How is it caught? Where is it getting caught? Is it farmed? Is it wild? Sometimes farmed is good, sometimes farmed is bad, sometimes wild is good, sometimes bad. We weeded through all that and cut certain menu items that were not in line with our principles.  

This has been the approach we’ve used with all our fish. And after that we went through the same process with pork, chicken, and beef. We source through D’artagnan, and they partner with local farms that have strict guidelines for their sourcing free-range and grass fed. And when you taste it, it's night and day.  

Link to Blog Post: Sustainable Seafood: Our Win-Win-Win

Learn More: Wild Caught vs Farm Raised Seafood

We hear all these buzzwords, like “free range” and “cage free”.  Sometimes these claims can be greenwash.  How do you know which claims are good?

Chef Tonti: We look for third party accreditation. Then you need to look at where the accreditation is coming from, who's doing the accreditation, and why they're doing accreditation.

Tommy: We’ve built relationships with partners we’ve come to trust, starting with purveyors and food sourcing. Every business is a collection of all the other businesses and organizations and people that you interact with. We really feel this ecosystem growing and it just makes everything so much easier.

For example, going back to the Billion Oyster Project, what could a family owned catering company possibly do about New York City’s waterways? But because The Billion Oyster Project is doing these amazing things, we can partner with them and contribute to their impact. And that’s just one example. None of us can do this by ourselves. So it really starts with partnering with awesome companies, organizations, and people who are further along, and a lot more knowledgeable in these areas, than we are, and figuring out how we can work together and learn from them.

What advice would you give other green teams out there?

Tommy: A big part of it is patience, because sometimes we'll have a meeting with our Green Team and there's not much progress to report because we’re waiting on something, or we can’t tackle something because a solution hasn't surfaced yet. So with some things we have to be patient until the time is right. But if we have enough eyeballs on it, we know that the time will come for each one of these items on our bucket list.

We definitely want to be a part of proving that sustainable events are possible.There's this misconception that the events industry isn’t really compatible with sustainability, doing events that are one night only, build it, break it down, and go home in a sustainable way. It’s important to me that we're on the front line proving that it is possible. A high tide raises all boats, and the more venues, vendors and other caterers that come onboard with us, the easier this will continue to get for us all.

Website: www.thomaspreti.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/thomaspretieventstosavor

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ThomasPretiEventsToSavor

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/thomas-preti-caterers

Tommy Preti Jr. LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-preti

Christopher Tonti LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-tonti-57097aa8 

Christopher Tonti Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cheftonti/