It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

At some point, it feels like every business will have to compete with Amazon.

The stereotyped struggle of the 20th century was mom and pop versus Walmart. And we’ve all seen how that changed the commercial landscape in downtowns across America, and right here in Acadiana. Economies of scale are a powerful thing.

The new family business isn’t likely a brick and mortar anymore. E-business has created new opportunities through products on demand and on delivery. It’s the upside of entering a digital marketplace. If you’ve got a product to sell, you can find a low-cost way to market it. 

It’s crowded out there and companies of all sizes need a way to differentiate what they do. And what better way to get ahead than get reviewed. 

Sarah Branton, has found a niche as a supplier, so-to-speak, of reviewers.  Her company Real Product Talk brokers free samples of new products to a network of around 1,000 reviewers. Reviewers are unpaid, but they get loads of free stuff to try and then tell the world what they think on Amazon, Target, Etsy and Google. Real Product Talk has given away around $1 million in free products since Sarah and her partner launched it in 2014. 

Originally from Cecilia, Sarah is a serial entrepreneur and podcast host. She’s also leveraged her connections into a successful affiliate marketing business on Facebook. 

Laure Hess got her start in digital marketing and found her big break in the gig economy. Laurel created Hampr, an app-based laundry delivery service, that connects laundry-laden households with washers willing to take that burden off their hands. Hampr’s target market is Laurel herself — the busy-mom-on-the-go. But during the pandemic, the service became useful for frontline workers working long hours.

Working in the healthcare industry gave Laurel an opportunity for a pandemic pivot. She used Hampr’s existing delivery network to spin off Presto Health, a startup that delivers prescriptions in partnership with Ochsner Lafayette General. In 2020, Hampr was selected for Techstar, a highly competitive startup accelerator in Austin that comes with a $120,000 investment award. 

Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur are at our website. Hear Laurel talking about her early roll out of Hampr here.

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There’s a silly proverb: "Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach." It's silly because we all know that some of the best teachers can do and can teach. Skill and the ability to lead by example are immensely valuable especially when you’re teaching a craft or trade or a sport.  

Teaching is a good product. And when executed properly it puts students on a lifetime path of learning and enjoying.  

Melissa Hill created a space for folks to do just that . Niche Creative Studio in Lake Charles is part craft shop but all creative studio. A third-generation sewer, Melissa grew up crafting and carved out a side-hustle making memory quilts while she worked in nonprofits. She launched Niche in 2014 as a center for what she calls “missional creativity” — helping people find their own creative passions. 

Savannah Vinsant Thompson accomplished her childhood mission pretty early. At 19, she was the first American to qualify for the Olympic trampoline finals and  joined Team USA for the 2012 Olympic games in London. Since then, she’s made a living training the next generation of Olympians at her gym Hangtime TNT. She offers tumbling, cheer and gymnastics courses at two locations, one in Scott and one in Broussard. Somehow she squeezed in winning a national championship in 2018 before stepping back from Olympic competition to focus on her work. 

You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. There's more lunchtime conversation about Lake Charles businesses here and about creative outlets for kids here.

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You know a concept has become ingrained in the business world when it gets an acronym or shorthand. MVP — minimum viable product. CSR — corporate social responsibility. And now DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Emphasizing diversity is nothing new. Business leaders, especially in corporate America, have embraced the idea that drawing from a wider pool of talent and perspective can make their companies better. The other two components — equity and inclusion — are somewhat newer considerations in boardrooms. 

Equity, in this case, meaning the distribution of stake, power and opportunity and inclusion, meaning a proper seat at the table. 

They have become more common in hiring and workforce development in the last few years, but the urgency of the issue exploded in 2020, particularly around racial justice. Put simply, it’s not just a moral imperative any more. Companies can’t afford to be toxic. Changing can require facing down unvarnished truths and having some uncomfortable conversations.

Uncomfortable conversations are a specialty for Elsa Dimitriadis. Her company Conversation Starters specializes in diversity and facilitation training. They help companies take a hard look out how they do business and whether their practices make room for everyone.

Conversation Starters launched in 2016, inspired by the unrest caused by the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. Data from their work with local and national clients shows substantial improvement in workplace perceptions of leadership diversity, belonging and respect. In short — their method works. 

Taniecea Mallery heads the Office for Campus Diversity at UL Lafayette, but she began her career in math, getting a PhD in applied and computational mathematics from Princeton.

Since returning to Lafayette, Taniecea has spearheaded UL’s strategic inclusion plan and has worked to help the school identify faculty members from underrepresented communities. Her leadership has put UL on the map as one of American higher ed’s DEI frontrunners, helping the school become one of only 19 U.S universities to participate in Aspire, a program for faculty inclusion in science technology engineering and math launched by the National Science Foundation.

For more background to this conversation, check out this conversation about diversity and neighborhoods in Lafayette.

You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website.

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Researchers estimate that more than 2 million Americans need help with an opioid addiction. And only about 25% will actually get it. 

This can all seem so very daunting. But the reality is, we are getting better at treating substance abuse disorders.  For one thing, we have better medicines that are keeping people alive. And providers are changing how they approach treatment of the disease, now recognizing that stability, not abstinence, is essential to sobriety. 

Mark DeClouet is a psychiatric nurse practitioner. And he’s among a relatively small number of addiction treatment providers in Louisiana who have embraced this more compassionate approach. His clinic, Axis Behavioral Health, meets opioid addiction patients where they are. Crucially, his is one of the few operations that makes this treatment readily available to people insured by Medicaid.

Of course, the changes in how we treat opioid use disorders come from a better understanding of how they happen in the first place. Broadly speaking, health researchers have come to understand that our health is not just a function of our physical wellbeing. Where we live, where we come from, what we do and what our circumstances are have immense influence on our likelihood of getting sick and, perhaps more to the point, recovering. 

Left unaccounted for, these social determinants of health can frustrate the treatment process and lead to repeat hospital visits, which drives up the cost of healthcare for everyone, while no one seems to get healthy. What good is a good drug if the nearest pharmacy is 25 miles away, you live alone and you don’t have a car? 

Holly Howat has a nonprofit that tries to address the external factors that can complicate treatment. Beacon Community Connections has a simple innovation: the telephone. Her community care navigators connect with patients after they are discharged from the hospital to make sure they have what they need to get the best shot at staying healthy.

Lafayette is proud of its anointed title of "America's Happiest City," but clearly there are dark days for many of us here and across what appears from the outside to be bucolic Acadiana.

Photos from this show by Jill Lafleur are at our website. There's more Acadiana mental health talk here.

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Grocery stores did very well during the pandemic. In 2020, Lafayette grocery stores pulled in just over $300 million, a 10% increase over the previous year. It makes sense. Restaurants shut down. People stayed home. Supplies were key to surviving a stay-home order. 

Now, imagine that there wasn’t a grocery store near you. Imagine you lost your job, or you were furloughed. Maybe you don’t have a car and the nearest grocery store is five miles away. If that’s your situation, you live in what researchers call a food desert. And that’s not just a problem during a pandemic. 

Having access to healthy food is essential to a good quality of life. And more and more people now live in food deserts. They live shorter lives with higher rates of chronic disease. It’s a serious social problem and it disproportionately impacts poor and historically black neighborhoods. 

On this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana, Christiaan Mader's guests are working to bring healthy food to communities without it, specifically on Lafayette’s northside. 

Kevin Ardoin comes from a family of farmers, but he didn’t become a farmer himself until he had an epiphany. He quit his job in retail and got to farming. He now owns Zydeco Farms — a 43-acre produce farm in Evangeline parish. In 2020, Kevin launched Fightingville Fresh, the first farmers market in Lafayette’s Fightingville neighborhood and its mission is to make good, healthy produce available to folks living in a food desert. 

While Kevin is working in Fightingville, Tina Shelvin Bingham is planting all kinds of seeds in the McComb-Veazey neighborhood of Lafayette.

Tina is Executive Director of the McComb-Veazey Neighborhood Coterie and the Community Development Director for Lafayette’s Habitat for Humanity. She’s worked to grow prosperity in the neighborhood since 2012. And that includes creating a community garden, where McComb Veazey residents grow and share produce. Like Kevin, Tina’s current career path was a detour. She was trained as an engineer and is now engineering a brighter future for her neighborhood. 

See photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's lunch-table conversation about sugarcane and crawfish farming in Acadiana.

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In case you were born after 2000, DJ stands for disc jockey. And true to the name, that’s what DJ’s did. They rode a record till it broke and  became a hit. 

Today, being a DJ isn’t so much about introducing people to new music. At least that’s not the case with DJs on mainstream radio. Hits are everywhere. You can stream them any way you want. People tune in with expectations of what they will hear. 

That’s why DJ Digital, a.k.a. Brandon Journet, says he’s in the “gathering business.”

Digital is old enough to remember hauling sacks of vinyl from gig to gig. But young enough to have been underage at the time. Locally you know him as an on-air personality on Hot 107.9.  He also hosts a nationally syndicated hip hop show via Townsquare Media called XXL Higher Level Radio. 

Of course, restaurants were always in the gathering business. Ambience and culture in a dining room is often as important as what’s on the plate. In a place like Acadiana, where everyone can cook, you have to have some other kind of edge. 

Restaurateurs often miss this crucial step in developing their businesses. Making their restaurants stand out and leave a lasting impression is essential to success. And with razor thin margins, getting it wrong can be devastating. 

John Petersen helps restaurants avoid those traps. John is a consultant with Social Advising, a company that contracts with new restaurants to shore up and design their businesses from the back of the house to the front door. 

John is a serial entrepreneur and a partner in some successful restaurants himself, including Central Pizza & Bar in Downtown Lafayette.

You can see photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's some more lunch table conversation about food and music in Lafayette (an almost inexhaustible subject).

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Before the folks behind Beausoleil Books built a coffee shop or a bar to go inside their new boutique, they checked with their neighbors — the cafes and bars in Downtown Lafayette. They settled on a wine bar: something new to the fabric of Jefferson Street and something that wouldn’t compete. 

That’s the shop local response to behemoth retail. Collaboration. Neighborliness. 

Bryan Dupree and his three business partners created Beausoleil to bring new literature and ideas to Lafayette and to celebrate the French language. They stock new fiction and classic and cookbooks, in English and French. Their wine bar, The Whisper Room, is coming later. 

A big part of what you get at a local shop like Beausoleil is personalized experience. There’s nothing more personal than style, especially when what you wear is fashioned by hand, like a work of fine art. 

Hat-maker Colby Hebert’s shop The Cajun Hatter is another newcomer to Downtown Lafayette, but his hats have been in demand since he first started making them in 2016.  His brand took off in New Orleans, where he also spent time in the film industry, both as an actor and in costume production. He found his way back to Acadiana in 2020.

Hat-making has seen something of an explosion recently. Four years ago, Colby was one of a few dozen hat makers in the U.S. Today, there are hundreds. Being a Cajun Hatter, makes Colby one of a kind.

You can see photos by Jill Lafleur from this show at our website. There's more lunchtime conversation about the Acadiana book business here and meet local author and illustrator Denise Gallagher over lunch here.

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The great American shopping mall has been on the endangered species list for several years now. But the retail apocalypse has yet to be realized. If malls are doomed, they don’t seem to notice. 

It is true, however, that the way we shop is in the middle of a long disruption. When Amazon came along, it heralded the end of the in-person shopping experience and the trimmings that go along with it. In the mall’s case - food courts, arcades, playgrounds. 

But the human touch has persevered. Brick and mortar stores have been making a coming back as people turn to bespoke shops to get personal guidance. Brands and retailers have to make it work both online and offline, embracing the advantages of each vehicle. 

Vintage

Fashion retailer Mitzi Guidry is swimming upstream of retail trends. After moving back to Lafayette from Los Angeles she converted her online vintage boutique into a brick and mortar shop in Downtown Lafayette, called Lilou. Lilou collects and curates vintage and unique pieces for re-sale. It also doubles as a micro-cafe, allowing Mitzi to throw food popups and create a culture and community around her business. Mitzi has worked in the fashion industry for close to two decades, and still maintains a full-time gig with Los Angeles Leathercraft, a clothing manufacturer based in L.A. 

Churro

For malls and retailers competing with online giants, the shopping experience is everything. And that often includes food service. Food courts have always been around shopping malls but they’ve become more and more important and more and more exotic in what they serve.

Daniel Estaban owns and operates The Churro’s Boutique, a kiosk in the Acadiana Mall that whips up wildly creative and personalized portions of the Mexican street dessert. If you haven’t had a churro before, it’s like a fried doughnut piped out of a pastry bag. You often find them with cinnamon and chocolate dipping sauce. But at Churro’s Boutique you can get them stuffed with cream cheese and strawberries and even mounted into a cake.

You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at our website. And here's more lunchtime conversation about local commerce and global e-commerce.

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Maybe you could boil the tourism industry down into two segments: where you’re going and how you get there — the journey and the destination. Between the two of them you have the “why question,” as in, "Why bother leaving your house?" 

For Louisiana and Acadiana particular, the allure to travelers is an exotic land within reach. The region is unique. And if you land in the right spot — a coffee shop with a French table perhaps — you can be transported without going too far. 

It isn’t as organic as it seems. It’s taken years to claw back this area’s French language from the brink of oblivion, and that work is far from done. If it disappears, that’s one less reason for folks to travel here. 

Francophone

Will McGrew has taken up the baton of decades of preservation work but with a for-profit twist. His company Tele-Louisiane is part production house, part content platform. It creates and distributes French-language content from across the state and aims to grow the broader cultural economy in Louisiana French dialects. In a sense, he’s seeding the market. Both creating and meeting a demand for Louisiana French film, shorts, documentaries and other media created in Louisiana. 

Louisiana is the center point here. And Will intends to build a company that sources content from all the language cultures that make a home here. He founded Tele-Louisiane in 2018 and has steadily built a portfolio of original content for commercial and noncommercial partners. In 2021, he’s launching two new educational series marketed at the state’s French immersion programs.

Van

Of course for a lot of people, it’s not about where you’re going, it’s how you get there. RV travel isn’t just a means of conveyance, it’s a way of life. And one that commands a surprisingly lucrative segment of the travel economy. The RV industry accounts for roughly $50 billion in economic activity in the United States. And about 9 million Americans own RVs. 

The sector is also starting to get a bit younger, as those bellwether millennials have begun to buy the appeal of traveling the open road in what can amount to a studio apartment on wheels. But the RV industry has been missing the connective tissue that makes hotel travel easier in the information age. Apps like Kayak.com or Travelocity don’t exist to centralize booking for the RV market. And that’s problematic for travelers who, by nature, go with the flow and often need a place to anchor down at the last minute.

That’s where Spot2nite comes in. Created by Terry Broussard and his son-in-law, Spot2nite offers both RV parks and RV travelers a convenient way to connect and manage bookings. Unlike the centralized booking apps in the hotel and resort industry, Spot2nite allows site operators to keep their existing booking systems. Spot2nite has park clients in 11 states and is developing an Apple iOS based mobile app that will accelerate the company’s growth. 

You can find photos by Jill Lafleur from this show at our website.

Here's some more lunchtime conversation about Acadiana tourism.

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When you have a business, you usually have some sort of a business plan. Even if you don’t run endless spreadsheets, you have goals, and an idea of how things will look if everything goes right. And, though you might be a bit more reluctant to think about it, you generally have an idea of what things might look like if you hit a lean period.

But, no matter how carefully you plan for every eventuality, for our two guests on Out to Lunch today there was nothing in the playbook to turn to when events conspired against them in the first Quarter of 2020.

When we first talked to these guys about appearing on Out to Lunch, we had a very different show planned. They both had their own very different shows planned too.

Scott Feehan is Executive Director of Festival International. If you live in Acadiana, you’re already wincing in sympathy. And wondering, “What’s going to happen to Festival in 2021?”

If you don’t know anything about Festival International, it’s a gigantic, sprawling and fabulous, free, street festival that takes place in downtown Lafayette every year in April. It’s the biggest international music and arts festival in the U.S.

The Other Show

Are you wondering what could be equally as difficult as being responsible for staging an outdoor street festival during a global pandemic? How about running a theater company? That’s what Steven Landry does.

Steven is Managing Artistic Director of Acadiana Repertory Theater. Acadiana Repertory Theater, or ART, is one a of a rare breed of theater companies that specializes in premiering new plays. If you’re one of the 73,000 playwrights on planet earth, it’s tough getting your work performed on any stage, anywhere. That’s why ART gets to select their annual season of 3 or 4 shows from over 1,400 submissions.

Photos by Jill Lafleur. Check out Scott’s appearance on Out to Lunch in happier days for Festival, and all of us. But, hey good times are around the corner, the show must go on, and somehow we'll be live in 2021!

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