Sustainable Wedding Catering in Cornwall

Exceptional food, thoughtfully sourced.

At Fego Food Co, we believe luxury and sustainability should go hand in hand. For us, sustainable catering isn't about putting a green label on a menu. It's about hundreds of decisions — some significant, some almost invisible to our guests — that collectively shape the way we source ingredients, design menus, cook and run our kitchen. We've been making those decisions for more than a decade.

As a wedding caterer in Cornwall, we're fortunate to work with exceptional local produce. Our approach to sustainability combines seasonal cooking and Cornish sourcing with regenerative farming, responsible seafood choices, reducing waste and a constant willingness to question how we do things.

Our approach is simple: buy exceptional ingredients, source them as responsibly as we reasonably can, waste as little as possible, and keep looking for better ways of doing things.

Cornwall gives us a pretty good place to start.

Being based in Cornwall means we're surrounded by extraordinary produce. Our menus are built around the seasons and we source from Cornish farmers, fishermen, dairies and producers.

Our milk comes from Treleague Dairy, delivered to us in reusable glass bottles that are collected and used again.

Our meat is sourced through Roskrow Abattoir at Treverthen, while our crab comes from the fishing village of Cadgwith on the Lizard Peninsula. Our wider fish and seafood supply comes through M. Stevens in Newlyn, allowing us to choose according to what's available and at its best.

Butter, cream and yoghurt come from Cornish Dairy, formerly Trewithen Dairy, while we use St Ewe Free Range Eggs, produced here in Cornwall. You'll also find plenty of Cornish cheeses throughout our menus.

We use products from the Cornish Seaweed Company, tea grown on the Tregothnan Estate, and coffee from Cornish roasters including Originand Yallah.

We work with a range of fruit and vegetable growers and suppliers, including Gear Farm, Lannarth Gate Farm and Trevaskis Farm, depending on the season and availability. And some things travel an even shorter distance. We grow many of our own edible flowers for garnishing dishes, along with cut flowers that we use to decorate our food displays.

Local isn't automatically sustainable.

We love Cornish produce, but we don't think putting local in front of an ingredient automatically makes it sustainable. There is more to it than mileage. We consider how something was farmed or caught, when it's naturally available, how it reaches us, how it's packaged and, of course, whether it's actually a great ingredient. Our flour is a good example. We use Wildfarmed flour, made using grain grown through regenerative farming practices that put soil health and biodiversity at the heart of food production. It isn't necessarily the closest flour we could buy. But sometimes we believe how an ingredient is produced matters just as much as how many miles it has travelled. That's an important distinction for us. Our preference is towards regenerative and organic farming where practical, seasonal and locally produced ingredients, responsibly sourced seafood and produce that hasn't been unnecessarily air-freighted. For us, thoughtful sourcing means looking at the whole picture rather than simply counting food miles.

Sometimes the better choice means giving something up.

Large warm-water prawns are delicious. They're impressive on a plate, wonderfully versatile and, from a chef's point of view, incredibly useful. But the large farmed prawns readily available to us are generally produced thousands of miles away. Eventually we decided we couldn't really reconcile using them with the way we wanted Fego to operate. So we stopped buying them. Instead, we favour smaller cold-water prawns and brown shrimp from much closer to home. They may not have the visual impact of an enormous king prawn sitting on a plate. We think they're the better choice. And good cooking should make them the more delicious choice too.

Then there's the small stuff.

Some of the decisions we're most proud of will never be noticed by a wedding guest. Around 2015, one of our signature canapés was tuna with pickled ginger and wasabi crumb, finished with yuzu dressing. The clever bit was the presentation. A tiny pipette containing the dressing acted as a skewer. Guests picked the canapé up by the pipette, popped it into their mouth and squeezed. It was fun. It was theatrical. It tasted fantastic.

Everyone loved it.

We stopped serving it.

The plastic pipettes were extremely difficult to clean properly and, in reality, had become disposable. At a large event we could get through hundreds of little pieces of plastic for a few seconds of theatre. That started to feel rather ridiculous. Removing one canapé wasn't going to change the world. But it represents something important about how we've tried to run Fego ever since.

The small stuff matters.

The things you probably won't see

Walk into our kitchen and you'll find the same thinking in lots of decidedly unglamorous places. We rarely use cling film, preferring reusable containers with lids. Our milk arrives in returnable glass bottles. Rather than continually throwing away antibacterial spray and hand-wash bottles, we refill them, including using concentrated refill products from OceanSaver. Our fish is delivered in reusable plastic crates that are returned to our supplier and used again, rather than arriving in disposable polystyrene boxes. Fruit and vegetable peelings and trimmings are composted, while our remaining food waste is separated for collection. Our used cooking oil is collected and repurposed for biofuel. Nobody has ever booked Fego because they're excited about our antibacterial spray bottle. But multiplied across thousands of dishes and years of events, these little decisions start to matter.

Eating with the seasons

One of the simplest ways we can cook more responsibly is also one of the reasons we love being chefs. Cook what's good now. A September wedding shouldn't necessarily have the same menu as a May wedding. Spring brings asparagus, young vegetables and herbs. Summer gives us an abundance of vegetables, berries and seafood. By autumn we're moving towards orchard fruits, squash, mushrooms, roots and richer flavours.

Rather than starting with a fixed dish and sourcing its ingredients from wherever in the world happens to be producing them, we'd much rather start with what's genuinely good around the date of your wedding and create the menu from there. For us, that isn't a restriction.

It's inspiration.

And for couples getting married in Cornwall, it means their wedding menu can have a genuine sense of place and time.

Sustainability shouldn't mean compromise

We're wedding caterers first and foremost. The food has to be delicious. It has to look beautiful. There has to be plenty of it. Service needs to be exceptional. And when 120 guests sit down for dinner in the middle of a Cornish field, everything needs to work.

We don't think sustainability and luxury sit at opposite ends of a scale.

Some of the most luxurious ingredients are luxurious precisely because of where they came from: exceptional vegetables pulled from good soil, seafood landed by Cornish fishing communities, beautifully produced meat, artisan cheeses and ingredients grown by people who really care about what they're producing. Our job is to take those ingredients and make something memorable from them.

Less waste. Not less generosity.

Fego has always been about generous food. Reducing food waste doesn't mean reducing portions until somebody's quietly wondering whether there's another potato coming. It means planning properly.

Understanding guest numbers. Designing menus intelligently. Ordering accurately. Making good use of whole ingredients and having chefs who know what to do with the bits that don't appear in the photograph. Trimmings become stocks, sauces, purées and garnishes. Vegetable waste becomes compost. Unavoidable food waste is separated from general rubbish wherever possible. Much of what we now call sustainable cooking would once simply have been called good kitchen practice.

There's quite a lot to be said for that.

We're not perfectly sustainable.

We're wary of businesses describing themselves as completely sustainable, because we're not entirely sure what that means. Catering uses energy. We run refrigeration and ovens. We transport chefs, equipment and ingredients around Cornwall. Some of the ingredients we love — chocolate, olive oil, citrus fruits, coffee and spices among them — simply don't grow here. There are environmental consequences to what we do, and there will always be things we can improve. We'd rather be open about that than make environmental claims we can't substantiate. What we can say is that sustainability has influenced the way we've operated Fego for more than a decade. It influences the suppliers we choose, the ingredients we buy, the dishes we design, the waste we separate and sometimes even the dishes we decide not to serve. We're still learning. And we'll keep asking questions.

Sustainable luxury

Ultimately, we don't want sustainability to be a separate style of wedding catering. You shouldn't have to choose between an incredible wedding feast and one that's been thoughtfully sourced. Whether we're creating an elegant multi-course dinner, a generous sharing feast, live-fire cooking, beautiful canapés or something completely bespoke, the principles remain the same:

Great ingredients. Thoughtful sourcing. Seasonal cooking. Less unnecessary waste. No unnecessary compromise.

Because exceptional wedding food isn't only about how something tastes or looks on the day.

It's also about where it came from, how it got there, and what we leave behind.

Planning a wedding in Cornwall?

Every Fego wedding menu is individually created around the couple, the venue and the time of year. If you're looking for sustainable wedding catering in Cornwall and want exceptional food with a thoughtful approach to seasonality, provenance and sourcing, we'd love to hear what you have in mind.

Fego Food Co — refined, generous, seasonal and rooted in Cornwall.