In a cavernous hallway at Climate Pledge Arena (CPA) in Seattle, dozens of line cooks, sous chefs, and waitstaff stand in an oblong circle, chatty and shifty as a hockey team about to take the ice. For hours, they’ve been prepping food, running ovens, and shuttling towering racks of warming trays between 19 kitchens and four levels of suites, restaurants, and bars. When Executive Chef Molly De Mers walks into the circle for the “pep rally,” they go silent.

“I want you to remember that there’s a kid here tonight who’s making her first trip to a hockey game,” says Chef Molly D, as she’s affectionately known. “We might be here all the time, but for that girl, this could be one of the most special nights of her life. Let’s help make that happen.”

Cheers echo off the walls, and then everyone hustles to their stations, resuming the culinary choreography required to feed 17,000 people in under three hours. It’s a monumental task, and a typical one for hundreds of stadiums and arenas around the country. 

But the twist for De Mers’ team is a farm-to-stadium mission. Bringing the farm-to-plate concept common in high-end restaurants to a massive stadium setting is part of Climate Pledge Arena’s commitment to leading the charge toward net-zero carbon emissions on a large scale. Sourcing 75% of Chef Molly’s ingredients from within 300 miles of the city reduces carbon emissions by shortening food delivery distances, and the arena’s 19 kitchens are all electric, powered by renewable energy rather than natural gas. These ambitious steps on the food side of the business are part of the reason Climate Pledge Arena recently became the first major sports arena to receive the International Living Future Institute’s (ILFI) Zero Carbon Certification.

The arena sits a few blocks west of Seattle’s Space Needle. The historic venue was the original home of the NBA SuperSonics, the WNBA Storm, and countless events from Pearl Jam concerts to the Harlem Globetrotters. In 2017, the city of Seattle approved a plan to renovate the arena by digging 15 feet under the structure and rebuilding up to the existing, historically designated roof. The decision allowed the arena to expand its capacity without enlarging its footprint. It also meant builders avoided the material that would have been required to replace the 22,000-ton roof.

Around the same time, Amazon and the international climate change organization Global Optimism were developing The Climate Pledge, an initiative to engage signatory corporations committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

“As we were committing to The Climate Pledge with Global Optimism,” says Kara Hurst, Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer, “the naming rights opportunity came up for an iconic local arena and the future home of the Seattle Kraken. We felt that if we named it Climate Pledge Arena—instead of naming it after the company—we could really inspire a whole new generation to think about climate change.”

Naming the arena was simple enough, but living up to The Climate Pledge’s mission and achieving the highest standard of sustainable building certification for zero carbon was a bigger challenge. Natural gas was out, so the building was outfitted for all-electric power, from deep fryers to scoreboards and zambonis—an unprecedented shift for such a large, dynamic building. Single-use plastics were also unwelcome; all food and drinks are served in compostable wrappers and recyclable plastic containers that are later sorted on-site at the arena’s waste facility. To conserve water, a 15,000-gallon cistern was tapped to collect rainwater from the roof for the hockey rink’s ice. And to encourage guests to make a greener commute to its events, Climate Pledge Arena provides free passes on Seattle public transit. Back in the kitchen, De Mers and her team have reimagined food service operations.

“We have a 3,000-item inventory,” De Mers says. “Our goal is to source 75% of that within 300 miles. From ketchup to lettuce to beef to spices to eggs, we’re trying to move the needle to show other properties that you can do this, and then create a larger market that small businesses can access.”

Traditional arena food service relies on commodity products trucked in from thousands of miles away, leaving a costly carbon footprint for most menu items. And a paper from the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit found that our current food system incentivizes the production and consumption of low-nutrition, unsustainably produced food by externalizing two-thirds of the product’s true cost. The true cost of food includes the present and future costs of diet-related health issues and environmental degradation, including greenhouse gas emissions and loss of biodiversity.

As interest grows in supporting local farms across the United States, communities are grappling with how to make local foods accessible at scale. Two-thousand miles away in Austin, Texas, Edwin Marty leads the city’s food systems team as it builds community support for local food in public institutions. “The real challenge is cost,” Marty says. “Private businesses can scale up local food systems much faster than the public sector if they’re willing to subsidize some of those extra costs that are typically borne by the consumer or food producer. CPA recognizing the need to subsidize local producers is a big step in the right direction.” 

Amazon intends for Climate Pledge Arena to be a model for sports and entertainment sustainability, and its commitment to being net-zero extends into the building’s pantries, kitchens, beer taps, and waste bins. But the vision and the execution of the local menu—a constantly shifting puzzle of ingredients, sources, flavors, and seasons—falls to Chef Molly D.

The first woman executive chef to open a property and inaugurate a new team, De Mers has always had a renegade spirit. After finishing culinary school in 2005, she wanted to learn old-world cooking methods in Italy, but she was broke. She was also resourceful. At the time, eBay was a wild-west marketplace for anything from hand-knit sweaters to marketing provocateurs. De Mers noticed a casino company looking for unconventional ad space. For $18,000, she agreed to shave her head and tattoo its URL onto her scalp. Three days later she was on a plane to Italy.

De Mers' decades long career has spanned restaurants, convention centers, and the Seattle Aquarium, and she’s confident the arena’s investment in local food systems will pay off, despite the intimidating scale; as many as 1,600 burgers and 800 French fry orders are sold during a typical NHL game.

“I want to be transparent about this,” De Mers says. “It’s not easy to go local. I went around the city and I started knocking on people's doors—just like I did in Italy—and started breaking bread with people who have built this community. That’s how I met Richard Mullen and learned about his Too Good barbecue sauce, and how I heard about Austin Allred’s ambitious regenerative farm and beef ranch in central Washington.”

“Operating such a large facility that is so important to the community and the city requires a delicate balance,” De Mers says. “Fans come here to be entertained, and they're going to eat while they're here. The last thing they want is a lecture on food sourcing. And so, how do we weave in these really inspiring moments that celebrate local ingredients?”

Sustained energy pulses through big kitchens. Flames, knives, corners, steam, stress, grease—it can be easy to lose the big picture for the immediate task at hand. But De Mers and her team believe they can both make the world’s best smash burger and steer our food system toward a more sustainable and nutritious future. 

As the Kraken game enters the third period, De Mers finally stops moving for a few minutes in one of the lower-level suites. The intermittent crowd noise vibrates through the walls, a reminder of the thousands of people who have come here to watch hockey and share an experience. 

De Mers has another tattoo, but this one—set in a neat couple of lines descending from behind her ear down her shoulder—isn’t a web address. 

“It quotes Gandhi,” she says. “‘Everything you do in life is insignificant, but it's very important that you do it.’ These people come here and make huge memories, or see what’s possible in terms of sustainability, and they carry that home with them. Every time I leave an event, I sit up in the bleachers and I go, ‘Okay, we did it. This was big.’” 

Then, she thinks: “Let's do it again tomorrow.”

Images by Michael Hanson of Modoc Stories featuring Climate Pledge Arena, The Crows Farm, Richard’s Too Good Products, Royal Ranch and the Puget Sound Food Hub.

Video by Modoc Stories.