It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Entrepreneurs frequently explain how they came up with a business idea to solve some sort of problem they personally experienced. This "necessity is the mother of invention" incentive is also true in the world of non-profits and purpose-driven businesses more concerned about making a difference than making a profit. Often it is during the worst of times - crises, hardships, or conflagrations and c...

Have you heard this sentence lately? “Please listen carefully, our menu has changed.” I bet you have. It seems like every place you call, from a giant multinational company to a local small business, has a phone system that for some mysterious reason has to constantly be updated. Why exactly does the menu have to change? What was wrong with the last time I called when I had to press 1 for sales an...

Everybody likes to feel good. For some people that's simply the absence of pain. For other it's chocolate cake. As consumers we all like to splurge from time to time. Even if we’re pinching pennies, there’s always going to be a special something we’ll make an exception for because it makes us feel good, mentally, physically or emotionally. If you’re that entrepreneur, who can intuit what customers...

You often hear people giving business or career advice along the lines of, "Do something you love and you'll never have a bad day at work." Intuitively you just know that's not true: there's no such thing as having a great day every day, but as we've discovered over the years here on Out to Lunch, you can get pretty close. We've met people who have turned their passions for bee keeping, scuba divi...

When it comes to quality of life measures, Louisiana ranks near last in every category – especially health-related categories like life expectancy, and rates of diabetes, cancer, hypertension and heart disease. And we have some of the worst outcomes of any state in the U.S. But entrepreneurially-minded medical and health experts are trying to help address this by using new models of health care de...

The one constant in business (and in life), is change. Like most platitudes, this one also is true. You might not think things as already established and mundane as breakfast cereal or everyday signage need to change. But they do. Companies that are able to adapt to change, even if they’ve been around a long time - or start ups that can come up with a better way to deliver an old favorite - are th...

This is an encore presentation of Stephanie Riegel's conversation with fast food impresario Ted Kergan. We decided to unearth this episode and run it again because Mr. Kergan is one fascinating guy. In 2018 when we recorded this conversation, Ted was the largest franchisee of Sonic drive in restaurants in the state of Louisiana. He owned 58 Sonic locations in the central and southern part of the s...

Louisiana is known as a "sportsmen’s paradise" because of the abundant fish and game that make for good hunting and fishing. And that’s created something of a culture – one, admittedly shared by many states in the south and the west—that loves to hunt and fish. All sports require organization. And specialty equipment. Football, for example, is arranged by leagues - from high school through the NFL...

Our educational systems, from pre school through the graduate level, are in a constant process of evolution and, in many ways improvement, as pedagogy becomes more sophisticated and curricula become more specialized in response to an ever more complex world. And yet, in some ways we’re not at all keeping up and our schools and universities are falling short of how they need to be preparing student...

As many of our systems and institutions change these days, they challenge our long-held assumptions and make us rethink the way we do just about everything - even simple things like buying dish soap or sneakers. If you think there's nothing you don't know about online shopping by now, let me you clue you in on the next level, courtesy of Maryclaire Manard. Maryclaire is founder of Cluey Consumer ,...

The university is a place of learning, where scholars do research and impart their wisdom to students through lectures and courses. But with all those smart people walking around, sometimes great ideas emerge from the ivory towers of academia that are quite unrelated to one’s field of study or area of expertise. And, like all happy accidents, sometimes those are the best ideas. Take, for example,...

In today’s hyper-competitive economy, even if you're a sharp business person you need a lot of tools to run a business - from everyday people-management HR skills to social media marketing, and that's not even touching the nuts and bolts of your business itself. To keep up and stay competitive, local business people are turning to specialized sources for help. Jody Mitchell is CEO of Directed Anal...

In conversations about how cities ideally ought to run, you often hear the term "level playing field." That's meant to describe an urban environment that's equally accessible to everybody - physically, but also socio-economically. The concept behind this fundamental urban planning is, given that there are inevitably going to be wealth differences between different parts of town, as much of the str...

One of the biggest business stories in Louisiana today is in the growth of the renewable energy sector. With a growing acceptance of climate change, and policies in Washington that incentivize the development of renewable energy sources, it’s an exciting time to be in the clean energy space. Louisiana, because it already is home to so many petrochemical facilities, is uniquely positioned to capita...

In a part of the world where hurricanes and severe weather events are an ever present threat that appear to be getting worse, it would seem anyone who could come up with a way to  predict not only how your general area would be affected by a storm but how much wind and water were expected at your specific street address... Well, you’d expect that person to be a world-famous gazillionaire and proba...

Food is something we know we do well in Louisiana. We’re renowned the world over for our Cajun and Creole cuisines, our seafood industry, and the many restaurants and famous chefs we have produced. But Louisiana also has a thriving culture for food entrepreneurs . People may bemoan that our tech or manufacturing sectors lag those of Texas or Silicon Valley, but they cannot quibble with the fact th...

One of the first rules in business is to come up with something that solves a problem your target market didn’t know it had. It sounds so simple, right? But how do you know what those problems are? And, where do those ideas come from in the first place?. Well, in Baton Rouge, one place to look is LSU's Innovation Park and a company called Iventherm . Inventherm's latest innovation is a new startup...

For more than 20 years now, we’ve been hearing about how Louisiana is losing a football field of coastline every 30 minutes or so. Although progress has been made addressing this very real problem, climate change has continued to make the situation more dire, as temperatures increase and storms become more frequent and intense. What exactly is the status of Louisiana’s efforts to protect and rebui...

The global fast fashion market topped $21 billion in 2021, and by the end of 2022, that number is expected to exceed $93 billion - which will not surprise you if you have teenage girls anywhere in your orbit. The need to keep up with the latest fashion trends is fueling an 8% annual growth in fast fashion, a rate that is unprecedented and largely attributable to the growth of social media. But som...

Most of us escape from work by pursuing activities that might involve things like exercise, travel or possibly some combination of the two. Some people are fortunate enough to have figured out how to turn the stuff they do for fun into their actual business.  What is their secret? Is working at your hobby as idyllic as it sounds? Lann and Caroline Wolf are co-owners owner of Underwater Advent...

It’s been more than a decade since microbreweries and craft distilleries began to emerge across the country, and locally too. In the years since, their number and popularity have continued to grow. In 2010, there were 1,800 microbreweries in the US. Today, there are nearly 9,000. Craft distilleries, meanwhile, are growing at an annual rate of more than 11% and number nearly 2,300 – inc...

Change is good. Right? Well, maybe not when you tack the word "climate" in front of it. with a changing climate and rising utility costs, the way we design and build our structures and communities is changing to keep up. And while that presents new challenges it also presents opportunities for those who are thinking about and rethinking the way we do things.   Tom Neyhart is founder and CEO o...

If you’re looking for yet another worry to keep you up at night, consider this: pretty much every category of cyber attack increased in the past 12 months. And we’re not talking small scale numbers, either. Ransomware, encrypted threats and crypto-jacking attacks all more than doubled in this country last year.  In total, more than 1 billion attacks – from small scale home P...

South Louisiana is famous for its food. There is seemingly no end to the number of new and interesting restaurants that capitalize on this truly great aspect of our local culture. But restaurants and caterers aren’t the only ones in the culinary sector. Foodie entrepreneurs in Baton Rouge are coming up with all sorts of new products and services using their creative culinary abilities to fil...

There’s an old saying in business, "It’s not what you know but who you know," and as anyone who’s done business will tell you, there is more than a little truth to that adage. In today’s LinkedIn world it's easy to connect with people, but how do you get to know the right people? For that matter, how do you really know the people who are a part of your organization and whet...