Nurtured by moments spent cooking in the kitchen with her family, the love of food was planted early on for Lauren Carr. “My parents owned a 15-acre farm in West Linn and they raised sheep and chickens and they had a huge garden. So we were always out there, tinkering around and using all sorts of local produce to make dinners,” she says. “I always had a passion for food. I lived in a house my senior year of college with a friend and every Sunday I would cook us a huge pot of something for the week.”

After cooking professionally in restaurants and running her own catering business for 20 years, in 2017, when the opportunity came along to purchase Portland-based catering and events company, Artemis Foods, she dove in, recognizing the company’s complementary sustainability practices. “It really fit with my core values of cooking in season and with locally-sourced products,” she says. “Doing that as a caterer is a lot harder than doing it in a restaurant, because you have people who still want giant strawberry fruit platters in the middle of the winter, which we wouldn’t provide.”

By prioritizing ingredients at their peak, Carr and her crew are able to craft thoughtful menus that beautifully capture a sense of time and place for your events. Artemis Foods is the proud partner of well-known venues and clients around the city and beyond, including Everett West and Nike. Besides weddings and corporate lunch drop offs, she also contributes dependable service in giving back to the community. “We support a lot of nonprofit organizations that support women, children and the environment, while also keeping our own footprint as small as we can.”

Artemis Foods

503.233.8539 | artemisfoods.com | 1610 SE 3rd Ave., Portland, OR 97214