Simple stories aren’t always so simple. Just ask Steve and Kristine Short of Atlasta Catering. Scratch the surface of the boy-meets-girl-meets-farm-to-table plotline and you’ll find a more complex philosophical journey—one that’s helped the family business evolve into a hospitality organization rooted in a culture of practical sustainability.

Steve Short grew up with Atlasta, a small catering company his father created when the family moved to Arizona. Back then, it was a menu of boxed lunches and barbecue. He worked in the business and, in time, met and married his high school sweetheart Kristine. When it was time for Steve’s father to retire, the young couple bought the company.

Influenced by finances and youthful dreams, those first business plans were to grow big. In the early 2000s, they found that success with the catering side and opened two restaurants. The brick-and-mortar spots gave Short his first opportunities to delve into New American cuisine and develop his personal style.

“It was a pursuit of philosophies,” says Short about that first restaurant. “But I was way too young, and I just didn’t think that way then. Looking back, that’s what it was—I was trying to figure out who I was going to be as a chef.”

The recession in 2008 upended things. Within months, the couple was in a survival mode that had them rethinking their business models. Short was drawn to reconnect to food. He was also curious about farm-to-table concepts that were only nascent industry ideas at the time. This led him to sustainability.

By 2009, he had hired a director of sustainability and together they worked to figure out what that meant in the hospitality world. They started with trash, and a goal to eliminate all of it from the business. It took them six and a half years.

Today, their kitchens produce only 300 pounds of trash a week—extremely low for the industry. But the effort took them beyond a weekly metric. Reaching the goal entailed creating a culture and philosophy that now influences all aspect of the company. It’s a concept Short calls “practical sustainability” that keeps decisions focused on do-able actions.

“So often, you get into hospitality and the first thing you want to change is upstream—and you’ll never do it,” he says. “We can only change what we are doing. What that means is that if you are going to open a facility…all these ideas and practices eventually will just be normal courses of business.”

Short is also a consultant, sharing his experiences to help other businesses with their sustainability efforts. His philosophies help create a mindset that shifts away from metrics of dollars and cents.

“It’s this whole idea of true hospitality, true sustainability. Not just branding pieces, not just for marketing,” he says. “You can’t tie a metric to sustainability because sustainability is a path, it’s a process, it’s an action. And it never really ends.”

Much like new mindsets for sustainability, the Shorts’ mindset for their business has evolved, too. Led by the flagship Atlasta Catering, there are now a handful of hospitality concepts under the umbrella of the Steve Short culinary team.

Atlasta Catering represents the brand-level service at the heart of their philosophies. It excels in full-service events with the culinary team and a full kitchen set up on site. Short describes it as a restaurant-style experience at your home, venue or business.

The menus reflect Short’s evolution as a chef, featuring dishes he describes as an Arizona-influenced New American cuisine with one exception: Italian dishes in recognition of Kristine’s heritage.

In addition to Atlasta, there is also Casual Catering for events that don’t require a full-service staff, Cellar 9 Beverages highlighting the team’s bartending and beverage services, and Campus Provisions that manages food service for entire buildings like college campuses.

Clear Stock Consulting is a favorite concept for Short that provides consulting services based on his sustainable hospitality and practical sustainability solutions. And while they don’t have any restaurants right now, they also have a placeholder for when the time is right.

For the immediate future, Short continues to integrate sustainable efforts into the business, saying they will soon eliminate single-use products like plates, cutlery and straws from their catering. He says instead of trash cans, there will be drop stations with sorters to help with recycling. For Short, it’s all part of the journey.

“Sustainability is not a place,” he says. “It never ends; it evolves.”