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Foresight Design's Jason Phillip recently spoke with Greg Christian about the sustainability activities at this diverse catering company.
Greg Christian Catering, Greg Christian Organics, Organic School Project, Get Me Gregs – how do you summarize the business concept of your catering company?
We’re trying to have a high-end catering company, an online catering company, and a food company that sells organic food to grocery stores. The concept is to bring more positive foods to those three categories. By that I mean foods that are less machine-touched, less processed, less handled. The Organic School Project is trying to change the way we feed kids in Chicago schools.
How did you become interested in bringing those kinds of foods to market?
My youngest daughter was sick with asthma and the doctors couldn’t help her. So we went alternative medicine and organic food, and she got better. So I started to see that food can make a difference. Then I realized that I was a chef and I didn’t know where my food came from. I started to look at where it comes from, and my eyes just opened. I realized that maybe I can help people know where their food comes from too. If they know, they can be educated in their choice.
Do you think that when people have the information about where their food comes from they will make the right choices?
I try to stay away from conversations about right and wrong. They can go either way and it’s okay with me, just like I hope it’s okay with them if I eat cookies tonight. I hope it’s okay with the vegans if I eat some meat tonight. Taking it past right and wrong, once their awareness is raised eventually they’ll head towards more positive foods.
What challenges have you faced as you’ve tried to incorporate sustainability into your business?
It’s still so new. There’s just so much to learn. Serving local antibiotic-fee chicken that I get from Indiana costs more money. I can only get it delivered twice a week, and they have to have two days notice. It’s very different than conventional chicken, where I can call 15 guys and have it here in five minutes. We’re used to vendors working for us, but now we’re working for them.
So it’s a different dynamic between the buyer and the supplier than before?
With purchasing local, yes. Purchasing local vegetables is a challenge because the farmers need to be educated. The farmers have been trying to set up a local food system based on chefs, farmers’ markets, and CSAs, but they really could anchor their farms with steady business in food service. To do that they’ll have to lower their prices. To get there—and I’m going to help them get there—they’ll need two tiers of pricing. One is the bottom line price that pays the bills for which they have contracts ahead of time. This is high-volume food that they have to deliver to spec. The other half of their farms can be that sexy farmer’s market stuff.
It’s great to go the local, artisanal, slow food route for cooking at home. I do it. But that model isn’t sustainable. It’s not going to set up a real local food system where, if the Mississippi River flooded and we were cut off from the rest of the country, we could still feed the kids in school. I have no time for the righteous attitude that says we have nothing to learn from factory farms.
We have a lot to learn from McDonald's and Wal-Mart. They have perfected the art of consistency for the masses. I'm involved with the Governor's task force on local foods in Illinois, and I keep saying we need factory farmers at the table. Some of the other folk reacted like I wanted to invite the devil. But if you think about it, we need the Dean's Foods and Starbucks of the world just as much as we need the produce to be sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Factory farms account for more than 90% of the farmland in America. They’re not interested in setting up a local food system, but if we honor the work they do, which is shipping barges of food to Russia, they can help us. And if the factory farmers were to lower their defenses, they could learn a whole hell of a lot from the local farmers, the artisans. I look forward to the day when there’s a dialogue between the family farmers and the factory farmers, where they’re laughing together and learning from one another. That’s when the blend happens. It’s coming.
Besides changing the sourcing of your food, what have you done to make your business sustainable? |
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Soon our events will be more sustainable. For example, we’ll try to steer people away from using flowers from South America. We’ll recycle and compost the waste produced at the events. We can influence how much linen is used, and whether paper plates, biodegradable plates, or real plates are used.
Do you feel any pressure to compete on price? Or is the nature of food such that the customer is willing to pay more for a superior product?
They used to be willing to pay more, but not anymore. Things changed after 9/11 and people are more than ever watching the bottom line. So the dance is making a compelling argument and still hitting the bid. I’ll never be the lowest bidder, and I will lose some business because of it.
How do you communicate to the marketplace that you have a service that is different and better than they can get elsewhere?
What I’m doing now is calling the bosses of the people that hire the caterer. Because those people get it more than the person hiring the caterer. I’m trying to go as high as I can up the chain of command to get a meeting. Then I go in and do a PowerPoint presentation that lays out the situation that we’re all in together and explains what my company is doing to help. And then I ask if there’s a fit between their company and mine. Hopefully that person will dictate to the person hiring the caterer what to do.
What is your sustainability vision for Greg Christian Catering?
I want a kitchen that is zero waste with huge greenhouses where I’m growing a third of my vegetables. The kitchen would be almost all local organic food, where people can tell the difference between that food and the food they used to eat. My competitors will follow and learn from me. I want to pull along the catering industry and have the bigger players start to look at hormone-free meat and zero waste. I went hormone-free meat and four of my competitors went hormone-free two weeks later. They’re way bigger than me, but they’re watching.
With the Organic School Project, the dream is this: Imagine walking into a school and it smells good. You walk into the cafeteria and the kids are eating local green foods and portions of meat that are the right size for them. They know where the food comes from. When they’re done eating, they compost their garbage. Then they go out to the garden and do some mindful exercise like yoga or meditation that allows them to monitor themselves instead of being plugged in all the time. They work in the garden and get reconnected to Mother Earth by pulling weeds or water the plants. Then they go inside and do a history project on where potatoes come from. When they go home they ask their mom to go shopping with them and then in the grocery store they pick food that they’ve been eating in the cafeteria, and they bring the food home to their families through mom and dad. I see a garden in every school in America.
