Nora Marchetti

Nora writes the catering and events side of the Katalyst blog — the posts about what an event actually costs to produce, what belongs in the contract, and why the catering channel makes or loses its money months before anyone turns on a burner.

She started as a banquet coordinator at a conference hotel in the Berkshires, where her job was mostly reconciling what a client remembered from the planning call with what the kitchen had written down. She moved to independent off-premise catering four years later, specifically because the economics are visible there: no room rental subsidising a thin food margin, no banquet department absorbing labor into the hotel's payroll. Just the event, its price, and whatever is left afterwards.

Nine of her fifteen years were spent as director of sales for a New England caterer whose book was mostly corporate: quarterly meetings, product launches, holiday parties, fundraising galas and multi-day conferences, alongside roughly 130 weddings a season. That is where the patterns became obvious to her. Clients don't leave over price, they leave over a slow first reply. The final headcount almost never matches the contracted one, and whether that costs you money is decided by a clause you wrote months earlier. Tastings sell the food; the proposal sells the certainty. And the single most expensive line in catering isn't food cost — it's the event you staffed for 180 people who never showed.

Corporate work added its own layer, and it's the part she writes about most. A purchase order instead of a deposit check. Net-30 terms that turn into net-60. A procurement department that wants a W-9 before it will look at a menu, and an attendee count that changes the morning of the event. None of that is in the per-head price unless you put it there.

She has also seen the restaurant version of this go wrong many times. An owner reads that catering is a high-margin channel, books three large events in one week, and discovers that the same kitchen can't send 140 plated dinners to a conference center an hour away and still run a full Saturday service. Most of her advice on that subject is about sequencing: what to say yes to first, what a second prep shift really costs, and the point at which off-premise needs its own people rather than borrowed ones.

She came to Katalyst by way of the software problem. After years of running events out of a spreadsheet, a proposal tool, a separate deposit tracker, and a POS that knew nothing about any of them, she spent a consulting stretch helping caterers untangle exactly that mess. Katalyst was the first system she looked at where catering wasn't an add-on module someone had bolted on after the fact, and she joined in 2026 to write about the operational side of the channel for the people running it.

Her posts assume you're the one signing the contract and answering the 3 p.m. email from an event planner. They won't tell you events are easy money. They'll tell you what to charge, what to put in writing, and which of those two matters more.

Nora still works a few events a season herself, on the floor, because advice about events goes stale faster than anything else she writes. She lives outside Providence, keeps a folder of every contract clause she's ever had to enforce, and maintains that the meal is the part of an event nobody remembers — which is exactly why it has to be right.