By Andrea Weigl

The wedding guests queued up to a table laden with spring rolls and a fruit platter, waiting for the bride and groom to arrive Saturday.

If they paid attention, they might have noticed that the menu was written with a marker on a piece of tile, instead of printed on paper. Their plates, cups and utensils were made from compostable corn, soy or potato products. The truck that took the food to this Holly Springs wedding feast on Saturday runs on biodiesel. And of course, as much of the food as possible was organic or grown locally.

This is the business model that Raleigh's Green Planet Catering aims to expand. Not only does Green Planet provide the usual for green caterers -- sourcing food locally, offering biodegradable cutlery and using biodiesel -- the company is also trying to farm, so far on 1-1/2 acres on a 20-acre spread east of Raleigh. The farm, which has a flock of chickens, has produced plenty of eggs and a few vegetables for the catering business.

Whittaker has spent a lot of time at the farm, especially this year, preparing the land to be planted.

"It's very soul-satisfying being out here," Whittaker said recently out at the farm.

Whittaker, 29, who has worked in the restaurant business for years, used the profit from the sale of his North Raleigh home to become an entrepreneur not solely focused on making money.

"We can send out a zero-waste lunch," Whittaker says proudly. The box, utensils, napkins and food waste can all be composted.

Whittaker says the company's prices are about average for high-end caterers.

Going even greener

The business, he says, has had its own organic evolution. First, the owners knew they could easily control waste and found ways to compost the food waste; then they used compostable or recycled utensils, platters, plates, napkins and cups.

Next, they decided to run their trucks on biodiesel and hooked up with Charles and Ben Keefer, brothers who make the fuel. They were soon collecting used fryer oil from restaurants in the Moore Square Business Alliance, of which Tir Na Nog is a member. "We quickly realized we could control the food," Whittaker says. "I said, 'Let's get a farm."

Again, the Keefer brothers have been indispensable to Green Catering's staff, Whittaker says. At first, they learned to farm with the brothers' help on land owned by the Keefer family.

The brothers also knew where to get containers to store water for the farm. They knew where to get used vinyl billboards to solarize the vegetable plots for next year's crops, a nonchemical method for controlling soilborne diseases and weeds that involves mulching moistened soil with polyethylene, which increases soil temperatures and kills pathogens. They found a tractor to borrow, and one brother even built a shower fed by spring water.

"We are moving to self-sufficiency," Whittaker says. He hopes one day to have a full-scale educational kitchen farm with a produce stand.

He says the company wants to be known as "a great caterer with this side note of a new way of doing things."

A Green Catering fan

Saturday's bride, Gwen Hunsberger, grew up in Fuquay-Varina in an environmentally conscious family. "That's always been a part of my upbringing. I try to be careful of my carbon footprint," she says.

When looking for a caterer, she was pleased with what Green Planet had to offer: "They are pretty much the whole package," she said.

Plus, she says, their "spring rolls are to die for."

So much so that Whittaker and his staff set aside a plate of them for the bride and groom, just in case the guests ate all the rest.