Nora Marchetti

Nora writes the catering and events side of the Katalyst blog — the posts about what a wedding 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 country inn in the Berkshires, where her job was mostly reconciling what the couple remembered from the tasting 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 doing roughly 130 weddings a season plus corporate work. That is where the patterns became obvious to her. Couples don't leave over price, they leave over a slow first reply. The final guest count almost never matches the contracted one, and whether that costs you money is decided by a clause you wrote eight 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.

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 Saturdays in June, and discovers in week two that the same kitchen can't send 140 plated dinners to a barn 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 weddings 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 a planner. They won't tell you weddings 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 two or three weddings 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 reception dinner is the only course at a wedding nobody remembers — which is exactly why it has to be right.