Wedding Vendor Meals: You Don't Have to Feed Them

Why Not Feeding the Wedding Vendors is the Way to Go in 2026

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We have seriously lost the plot when even the assistant to the fifth backup photographer is demanding in their contract, the same $150 meal as your guests, to be served at an exact time — or your wedding pictures will be deleted. But who's in the right? Wedding vendors who "legally" demand to be fed, or clients who don't want to spend even more money feeding people who could easily pack their own lunch?

Brides.com Once Said Not Feed the Wedding Vendors

In January 2016, Brides.com published an article written by a wedding planner titled Which Vendors Do You Have to Feed at Your Wedding?, in which she stated: "My general rule is that if you're working just the wedding itself, feed yourself or pack a lunch to eat in the staff break area if you cannot survive the shift." And of course, wedding vendors specifically photographers, lost their collective shit so hard that Brides had no choice but to delete the article. But it thankfully lives on in the Wayback Machine.

And not gonna lie, I agreed with the tiki-torch mob at first….

But over the years, after photographing weddings of all scales, dealing with ass-wipe vendors and planners, and seeing countless videos of vendors calling out their own clients for being broke asses for feeding them a bootleg sandwich, I've grown to not only appreciate what was said in that article, but now find myself publicly telling you, the client, to not only stop tipping your wedding vendors, but also not bother feeding them the same $150 meal. And I'm bringing this up to show that I didn't dig this concept out of my ass — because it was once the public stance of the industry itself. And I wish it would have stayed, but here we are, with wedding vendor entitlement to the max.

Not to mention that most wedding vendors, for all the preaching about your story and putting the client experience first, fail to realize that you naturally, you come up with logical questions like: Do wedding vendors get meals? Do vendors count as wedding guests? Where do vendors sit at a wedding? And who gets vendor meals at a wedding? After realizing that, not only do you have to pay these people — and probably tip them too — but you also have to feed them!

10 Practical Reasons to Skip the $150 Wedding Vendor Meal

To be clear, I'm not straight-up saying DON'T feed your vendors period. Just don't go over budget on some bootleg-ass $50 sandwich or worse, an additional ten $75–$150 vendor meals. If I were you, I'd have something like a taco truck, a cup noodle cart, a hot dog cart, or even an In-N-Out trailer later in the night for everyone to enjoy, including the vendors. It just makes far more logical and practical sense for vendors to eat from a truck later on in the night when a quarter of your guests have left and there's not much to do but dance.

Think about it: if you were already planning on bringing food later in the night anyway, and it's charged per person, then with some guests having left, the vendors technically eat for free if you've already paid for the total guest count.