It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

What’s the future of the Louisiana worker? What a loaded question. Sometimes we get so caught up asking about the future that we forget that it’s already here. 

Chew on this: in 2020, mining for oil & gas accounted for around 1% of Louisiana’s GDP. That’s down from around 10% a decade ago. 

Louisiana has been in a pivot for a long time. And while we often talk about this change in terms of economic output, the real question is what happens to our workforce? 

Don’t count out innovation and manufacturing.  

Missy Rogers and her husband Scott founded Noble Plastics, which manufactures all kinds of custom, plastic molded products for a range of industries. Visit their facility in Grand Coteau and you’ll find robots whirring and a few dozen highly specialized employees.

Noble’s edge is taking both design and manufacturing in-house. They don’t just make things, they make the things that make things. A part of the company’s line is designing robotic machines and processes for other manufacturers.

Here’s a blue ocean strategy for Louisiana: digital wallets.

Louisiana is a pioneer in allowing residents to digitize their IDs and drivers licenses. Today, more than 1 million people use LA Digital Wallet, and during the pandemic around half a million people opted into a feature that allows you to digitize your vaccine card.

Calvin Fabre is the man behind that innovation with his company Envoc.

Digital credentialing is a pretty big space. Outside of state IDs, Envoc has developed a line of commercial verification and logistics apps for cargo shipping, inspection services and grading bubble sheet tests. LA Wallet itself is a growing service, and Calvin is actively pursuing Louisiana grads to staff it up.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. Check out Calvin Fabre's last visit to Out to Lunch here  when he was just launching LA Wallet.

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Imagine Acadiana without festivals. Between 2020 and 2021, we nearly got a taste of that reality. And for the most part it wasn’t pleasant. 

Gathering is a big part of the culture here. So when Covid made getting together dangerous, it also threatened a way of life. 

Festivals did what they could to keep the tradition alive. Going virtual was a workable substitute in a pinch, but the lift was still costly and the digital copy just couldn’t compare with the real thing. 

Christiaan's guests today navigated Acadiana’s largest annual gatherings through two straight years of pivots. 

Scott Feehan has been Executive Director of Festival International since 2015. Scott’s day job is in IT, but he’s been a cultural entrepreneur going on two decades now. If you grew up playing in rock and roll bands in Acadiana you might know Scott as the drum shop guy. Or as the man behind Lafayette’s School of Rock. 

Pat Mould runs programming and development for Festivals Acadians et Creoles. He’s the man in charge of what happens at the festival and, crucially, who pays for it.

Pat is a renowned chef who’s made a big mark in bringing Cajun cuisine into fine dining, and he’s also the interim general manager of KRVS, the voice of Cajun and Zydeco music and the home of Out to Lunch Acadiana.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. And check out Scott Feehan's take on the festival scene from inside the Covid bubble.

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When I work in a coffee shop, I don’t get much done. Honestly, I didn’t go to the coffee shop to work. That’s just a little white lie I tell myself to get out of the house. 

Coffee shops might be the easiest place to track down if you travel for work. You know there’s wifi, but the environment can be unpredictable. Is the cappuccino machine too loud? Too bad.

Well, what if you could plug into a space meant for work. Not easy to do unless you know somebody in town. You’ve heard of co-working spaces like WeWork, but that’s still a commitment. When you travel a lot you need something for 20 minutes, an hour, half a day and you’re gone. 

Clerc Bertrand has a solution for that. Workaroo: a network of office space for those of us hopping from place to place.

Workaroo uses an app to connect itinerant workers with office space.

Clerc lives in the Lake Charles area, but has grown Workaroo on the go herself, dodging lockdowns and hurricanes. Today, Workaroo has spaces in Lake Charles, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

Clerc plans to grow the company to stretch the I-10 corridor. When she’s not building workaroo, Clerc runs the McNeese State University Athletic Foundation.

If your workspace is the great outdoors, maybe this isn’t so much a problem for you. Anywhere is the place to be.

Artist and muralist Hannah Gumbo is building a career for herself with the world outside as her canvas. An avid traveler herself, Hannah is passionate about Louisiana and creating vibrant spaces that tease out our traditions with abstract flourishes and surprising detail. 

You can find Hannah's work on Downtown brick walls or barns scattered around Acadiana, and her work bubbles against the backdrop of our region’s rustic colors. She got her start with an ArtSpark grant from the Lafayette Economic Development Authority and recently won a second one to expand her work to business portraits.

Hannah will also shake up the stuffy headshot with a portable wooden booth packed with fun backdrops to make portraits of Louisiana business owners.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos + Amigos in Downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. Here's more lunchtime conversation about other work options in which one of Lafayette's most successful college dropouts talks with the dean of the UL grad school.

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For a couple of years, I’d say the most common investigation request I’d get was "Why doesn’t Lafayette recycle glass?" The natural follow-up, of course, is... "What happens to it?"

Well...for most of the glass you use - it ends up in a landfill. Even the stuff you thought you were recycling all those years ago. And here’s a disturbing fact: Glass takes one million years to degrade in a landfill. Think carefully before you toss that High Life bottle in the trash can. 

There is another option. Not recycling: upcycling. What’s the difference? Finding a new and improved use for your rubbish. Glass makes great mulch. It keeps the weeds, mold and mildew at bay. It doesn’t have to be changed out too much. And it’s lovely. It’ll make your garden glimmer. 

How do you make glass mulch?

Tina Crapsi of Backyard Sapphire does it with a glass crusher she built herself. The “annihilator” can turn a case of beer into a pound of mulch in 15 seconds.

Backyard Sapphire processes the glass and turns it into custom blends of colorful mulch.

The service went viral quickly, and Tina and her partner Dawn signed up a few dozen subscription customers for curbside pickup and have begun working with local businesses, too. Bit by bit, Backyard Sapphire’s grassroots approach is keeping tons of glass out of local landfills.

So we’re trying to clean up the ground, what about the air we breathe? Carbon emissions aren’t the only toxin affecting our respiratory health. In Louisiana, we’re in a constant battle with mold. 

Mold grows fast. It’ll spread with just 60% humidity in the air. Now imagine what happens after a hurricane? A home exposed to water can be overwhelmed with mold within hours. 

We’ve actually managed to make this problem worse in the modern era. Drywall and synthetic glues have made building homes cheaper, but they’ve also created breeding grounds for mold. Just a little bit of water can create serious problems. 

That means mold remediation is essential business in our neck of the swamp, but it’s actually not that common. Nicole Guillory Wenger and her husband founded DryMax in 2010 to respond to that gap. Nicole previously worked in architecture and did restoration work in post-Katrina New Orleans.

DryMax has since come to specialize in remediation, working a range of projects from post-disaster clean up to remediating historic buildings.

In Louisiana, there’s no shortage of work in the mold business. And Nicole spends a lot of her time teaching customers about what to look for in a quality mold contractor, even if she can’t take their work.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos + Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation you might like, about the connection between recycling and art.

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Swamps and the French language put up barriers to globalization in Acadiana for generations. At least that’s the conventional narrative. Even within our own community, we often underestimate just how wide the cultural landscape is in South Louisiana and has always been. 

Barriers persist. But there are lots of creative, thoughtful people chiseling away at them and mining for a common heritage. 

It’s not limited to art and cultural anthropology. Lafayette has explored international touchstones for decades through big events like Festival International and the Latin Music Festival. 

Cristina Martinez is in the business of expanding those horizons. She’s been an event planner in Lafayette for six years, managing projects big and small for Party Central and has hosted the Latin Music Festival herself. She’s also a media personality, moonlighting as the host of After Hours with Cristina Martinez, a Facebook Live show about sex, sexuality and sexual health. 

During the pandemic, Cristina stepped up as a daily reporter for El Sabor/Telemundo, translating press conferences and Covid information for Acadiana’s rapidly growing Hispanic community. Cristina was born in Puerto Rico and has lived in Lafayette since 2008.

What does it mean to be from somewhere anyway? Home is an idea  Olivia Perillo has explored in documentaries and photography. Since childhood, she’s been enamored of the connection between Acadiana’s swamps and the deserts of West Texas, where she spent time on trips to visit her mother’s family. 

Olivia and her creative partner have produced two documentaries over the last couple of years. Migration, which profiled women leaving their birthplaces in search of new homes. And Intention which profiled the diversity of Louisiana cultural traditions among women.

Olivia’s work on Intention was funded by a Create Louisiana grant, and her films have been screened internationally. She also works as an archivist for artist Lynda Frese and a photographer for Country Roads magazine. 

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show by Astor Morgan at our website. Also at our website you can find hours and hours of conversation about Acadiana's culture and its relation to our community and economy. Here's an episode about film and zydeco. 

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E-commerce is about speed. But not just for the customer, for the seller, too. The name of the game is striking while the iron’s hot. Get your product to the top of the search ranking on Google and you can move units, fast.

Once a cat meme goes pandemic, it pays to be the seller who can deliver the hype on a mug or a t-shirt.  The hard part is the logistics. Inventory takes investment and risk. What are you gonna do with all those cat mugs when the trend dies? 

Lafayette native Josh Goree’s company, Completeful, makes that problem go away.

Instead of stocking all the inventory in your house, waiting for the internet to do its thing, Completeful stocks and fulfills your orders on demand.

Based in Lafayette, Completeful has grown fast since Josh launched it in his garage, engraving custom wedding gifts in 2017. Today, Completeful ships tens of thousands of custom products each day for sellers on Etsy and Shopify, enabling scores of micro-shops around the internet with an integrated app. 

If the quick buck is your thing, then maybe graduate school isn’t for you. Going deeper into higher education is a way to bury yourself deep into a professional or academic pursuit. Believe it or not, it’s still a marketplace. Working your way through academia means finding a niche and selling yourself and expertise to your future peers and mentors. It can be highly, highly competitive, and very, very specialized.

And the graduate schools are competing for you too. 

In 2019, U.S. graduate schools conferred 1 million degrees, an increase of 20% from a decade earlier. And despite a decline in postsecondary enrollment overall, graduate and professional programs have actually increased enrollment over the last 10 years by 8%, according to the U.S. Census. 

UL Lafayette’s graduate school is a top producer of research. "How well do radishes grow in space?" "How does folklore impact the way our kids think and see the world?" Folks at UL are working on answers to those timeless questions. 

As the Dean of UL’s graduate school, Dr. Mary Farmer-Kaiser has a front row seat to that work. Mary has helmed the graduate school since 2015, and has taught history at UL since 2000. A native of Kansas, she charted a successful career for herself by seizing the opportunities in front of her. Some great advice for anyone entering the workforce. 

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation with Acadiana locals building unique businesses - Karen Thibodeaux and Jezebel Lobelia.

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If you don’t know or care much about wine, then the language around it can sound like Greek. Or French, perhaps, is more accurate. "Terroir," "appellation," "cuvee." It can all be overwhelming. Go to a restaurant, order a bottle. Which wine do you like? Red or white? For a lot of us, that’s as far as goes. 

Acadiana feels like Michelob Ultra country. People here drink light beers so they can drink a lot of beers. So maybe wine and wine culture would seem foreign to us...despite the French undertones of our lifestyle. 

Maybe try thinking of wine this way: As an expression of place. That’s what "terroir" means: the earth, the air, the water that made the wine. We talk about food this way in Louisiana all the time. You could argue that gumbos and boudins have terroir. But you’d probably be thrown out of the party.

Christiaan's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana, Acadiana's First Couple of Cool, Denny and Katie Culbert, are trying to tap into that obsession with place with their boutique, natural wine shop: Wild Child Wines. 

Wild Child opened in 2020 in Downtown Lafayette and has since grown a cult following with its select imports of small batch wines from around the globe. The shop has a small wine bar for tasting and teaching. Those have been consistent themes for the Culberts, who have spent the better part of the last decade building culture around local foodways with initiatives like Runaway Dish, a series of popup dinners that introduced adventure to Lafayette’s culinary scene. 

Outside of Wine Child, Denny is a photographer with credits in Saveur, Garden & Gun and Vice magazines. 

Katie owns and operates the boutique clothing shop Kiki and its two locations in Lafayette and Baton Rouge. 

This edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded in the studios of KRVS in Lafayette. You can see photos from this show at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation about local Acadiana booze, namely vodka made from rice.

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Having a green thumb is a good way to earn a living. Agriculture was the first big business. It created the marketplace and civilization itself. 

Of course, going green has an entirely new meaning these days. And I’m not talking about the green new deal. I’m talking about cannabis. 

The medicinal properties of marijuana have been known for ages. And believe it or not, Louisiana was one of the first states to recognize that, passing legalization laws decades ago that sat frozen on the books. 

But over the last couple of years, legislation opened up the cannabis and CBD market in the state, albeit with a tight regulatory grip. 

Crystal Grayson and her husband Matt, an horticulturalist, seized on the new opportunity in 2020, launching Zorillo. Zorillo isn’t a CBD shop, though you can buy Zorillo products. It’s more like a co-op. Crystal and Matt seed, grow and process their own cannabinoid products and they help other farmers do it too. Crystal and Matt’s farm is in Broussard, and Zorrillo is under the umbrella of the company Grass Masters, which also includes Matt’s lawn care and landscaping business. Crystal also works as an escrow officer for a title company.

When you think green you might also think of the emerald isle. Tony Davoren, hails from Ireland but settled in Louisiana with his wife Sheila. Tony is also in the landscaping business with his company Irish Guy Landscaping, but you might also know him through his work in the traditional music scene. Tony is passionate about the crossroads of Celtic and Acadian culture. He is the creator and director of the Celtic Bayou Festival and also runs an Irish Dance Summer Camp with his wife.

Tony and Shelia met while touring the U.S. as part of Riverdance and now they live in Sunset where Tony has been perfecting his recipe for smoked sausage.

You can find photos from this show at our website.

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So much attention in business news is tech, and I don’t just mean Big Tech. The word “innovation” is thrown around a lot when really what we’re talking about are gadgets...not ideas. 

But innovation in business is often about what you do, not what you use. Processes, procedures, protocols and work culture — these can all be major innovations in a successful business model, and none of them require a degree in computer science or a garage in Palo Alto to develop. 

Entrepreneurs have been making money trying to optimize other businesses long before there were CRMs. It’s a big part of helping companies grow and become more profitable.

Jeff Resweber and his company An Extraordinary Mind do just that. Jeff helps companies big and small reinvent their processes - the under-the-hood wiring that can get tangled and gunky and slow growing companies down. 

Jeff and his team embed with their clients, figuring out ways to make the less glamorous parts of their business run smoothly so the engine can hum. An Extraordinary Mind has worked with companies in a dizzying array of industries - finance, IT, education and energy. That’s why they call him the “instant expert.”

Running a good company isn’t just about making it more efficient. If you want to run a good company, do what you do well, but also...do some good. An important place to start is protecting your people. 

For almost three decades, Ray Flores’ company Industrial Safety Solutions has helped companies make their workers and their work safer but, again, not by developing new gadgets, but by using the principles of behavioral psychology. 

ISS helps companies create cultures of safety in their workforces, primarily serving the oil and gas industries. In 2020, ISS spun up a new division that helps companies roll out safety plans to address the threat of Covid. The new line built on years of hurricane recovery work and has become an important revenue line as the energy industry in Louisiana continues to decline. 

Ray is passionate about community outreach and has recently connected with the nonprofit of Love of People as a vehicle to help him repair an old church that he credits with a piece of divine providence in his career.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show by Nathan Davis at our website.

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The ocean can be terrifying. The horizon doesn’t end. It’s vast and unknown, like staring into space only it’s lapping at your feet. But in business, the ocean is a both an apt symbol for opportunity — think "the blue ocean strategy" for marketing and innovation — and a great place to make a living. 

Louisiana has certainly done that for decades with offshore drilling, shipping and seafood. Civilization itself has made use of the ocean for commerce for millennia.

Water 

Our long relationship with the ocean has involved mostly, in one manner or another, sailing across it. There’s still plenty of stuff to figure out about working in deep sea environments. Christiaan's guest on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana, Erick Knezek, and his company, Oceanetics, specialize in developing cutting edge engineering solutions for ocean-going enterprises, including the world’s largest — the U.S. Navy. 

Oceanetics is based in Annapolis, Maryland, home of the U.S. Naval Academy — Erick’s alma mater — but Erick is based right here in Lafayette.

Oceanetics does a lot of defense contracting work, including research and development for both the private and public sector, and also specializes in developing renewable ocean-based energy.  

Blood

Blood might be thicker than water, but unlike water, it’s not a renewable resource. The business of collecting blood is an old one, and it’s done primarily for serving the medical community. The work is important. Science has yet to develop a suitable substitute for it, and hospitals need it on high demand. 

The nation’s largest independent nonprofit blood services provider is Vitalant, which you might know by its previous brand name: United Blood Services.

Vitalant was founded in 1943 in Phoenix, Arizona and has grown to a network of 120 donation centers across the U.S. Vitalant operates here in Lafayette and serves 23 hospitals in 21 parishes. 

Stephanie Kizziar is Vitalant’s Communications Director, and reports that just 3% of Louisiana’s eligible blood donor population are active donors. That means demand outstrips supply significantly, with local hospitals requiring at least 250 donations each day.

Stephanie got her degree in mass communications from LSU in 2008 and previously worked in marketing. She’s been on the Vitalant team since October of 2020.

Out to Lunch Acadiana is recorded live over lunch at Tula Tacos and Amigos in downtown Lafayette. You can see photos from this show at our website.

You might also enjoy this previous Out to Lunch Acadiana episode about the marijuana business, for no other reason than, hey, who doesn't like hearing about the magical properties of weed?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.