It's New Orleans: Out To Lunch

Whatever you're doing today, whether you're at work or at home, or somewhere in between, you spend a great deal of the day thinking about yourself. Not in a bad or selfish way, just in the normal way most of us do. There are other people who are not thinking about themselves in quite the same way. They're thinking about the lives of others. And how to save them. Anoop Jain is saving lives in India by building and operating community toilets. 600 million Indians do not have access to a toilet. As a result, 450,000 Indians die every year from diseases related to eating or drinking contaminated food or water. Half of these deaths are children under the age of 5. While studying public health in New Orleans, Anoop became aware of the Indian health issue and started an organization called Sanitation and Health Rights in India. SHRI builds and operates community toilets in India. The company has 40 full time employees. The toilets create methane gas that powers water generators that transform the waste wate

We often hear people say they don t like certain foods. Like Brussels sprouts. Or blue cheese. But when was the last time you heard somebody say, "I don t like pie" Everybody likes pie, right So, if you have a company that makes pies, and they re pies everybody likes, you d think it wouldn t take long till you re a household name. Well, like most things, the pie business isn t quite as straight forward as it looks from the outside. Nicole Eiden, along with her partner Marielle Dupre, launched Windowsill Pies in New Orleans in 2011. Their pies may be sweet but the pie business, apparently, isn t. The Windowsill Pies story is an inspirational lesson in navigating the difficult road to small business success. If you have an idea for a food business and you want to get it out of your kitchen and on to supermarket shelves, Sanjay Kharod is the guy to know. Sanjay is the Executive Director of Edible Enterprises a food business incubator. There s no doubt that when it comes to food, wherever you live, local is bette

Have you heard this one Bill Gates walks into a bar... Actually, it s not a joke. It s a lesson about the definition of averages. Bill Gates walks into a bar. There s 20 people in there. The average net worth of everybody in the bar is now 5 billion dollars. In a similar manner, New Orleans business boosters like to say these days, "New Orleans is the fastest growing tech city in the country." As of right now it s technically true, thanks largely to the Bill Gates walks into a bar effect of a company called DXC Technology. DXC is the world s leading IT company. It employs 170,000 people in 70 countries. They have an annual revenue of more than 24 billion dollars. In mid 2018, DXC took over what used to be the Freeport McMoran Building, across from the Superdome, and opened an operation called The New Orleans Digital Transformation Center. Terrell Boynton is Director and General Manager of DXC Technology s New Orleans Digital Transformation Center. DXC is not the only technology game in town. Far from it. Ther

Show business has all kinds of folklore and superstitions. One of them is, "Never work with pets or kids." Not because entertainers don t like pets or kids, it s because they don t want to be up staged by them. Peter Ricchiuti s guests on today s Out to Lunch are both entertainers who have chosen to ignore this advice. They re not just working with kids, they re working for kids. Ann Mahoney is a successful TV and Movie actress. You might recognize her from The Walking Dead or any of the more than 30 movies she s been in. Ann is augmenting her acting career with a kids clothing company, called Peeky Designs. Ann is the clothing designer and owner of the company. CR Gruver is a successful musician. As well as being a sought after piano player, he s a member of super group, The New Orleans Suspects along with members of the Neville Brothers and James Brown s band. CR is augmenting his career as a piano player by founding the local chapter of School of Rock. School of Rock is a nationwide music school, populariz

The Small Business Association defines a small business as having fewer than 500 employees. By that definition, over 99 of all businesses in the US are small businesses. Even so, the businesses in the remaining 1 that they re competing against have a hugely outsized influence when it comes to marketing and other resources. How does a small business compete with the likes of Amazon and WalMart In New Orleans you could be a part of a specialized marketing enterprise called The Scout Guide. Taylor Morgan is owner and editor of The Scout Guide New Orleans. Blake J. Stanfill is Director of Growth at a company called TrepWise. TrepWise is a business consultancy that arms small businesses, non profits, and public sector organizations with the same tools that big business uses. All of us agree that supporting our local small businesses is a great thing to do. For most of us, that amounts to going shopping once in a while. For Blake and Taylor, supporting our small business community is what they do every day. Because

Each year around the holidays, we shift our collective focus for a few weeks. In addition to thinking about our own needs, we think about others. We buy gifts. We listen to music that s all about unanimity. And we give to charity. For some people, this kind of largesse is not confined to the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It s what they do every day. Oji Alexander is Executive Director of a non profit organization called Home By Hand, property developers who are attempting to pull off what has till now has seemed impossible. They develop neighborhoods so that new housing is not just affordable, but stays affordable. In other words, it s an alternative to neighborhood destroying, home flipping, gentrification. Brian Kish is Executive Director of The Emeril Lagasse Foundation, the charitable wing of Emeril s culinary empire. It unites New Orleans arena of great success food with one of our fields of greatest distress education. Since 2003, The Emeril Lagasse Foundation has disbursed over 10m in grant

We hear a lot about the link between the online world and the real world these days. Most real world purchases begin with an online search. Even purchases as big as a house. There s no better example of the influence of the online world on the real world of real estate than Curbed. Curbed is technically a nationwide real estate blog. But it s also an influencer. It reports on real estate trends, but it also helps create them. Curbed is smart, and hip. Missy Wilkinson is the New Orleans editor of Curbed NOLA. Liz Maute Cooke is the owner of Lionheart Prints. Lionheart sells stationery and other products from its store and printshop on Magazine Street. But this is not your grandma s Hallmark greeting card store. Lionheart is smart, and hip. On this edition of Out to Lunch, Peter Ricchiuti has lunch with two of the smartest and hippest people in New Orleans business. Photos at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

New Orleans is the home of the poboy. And the muffuletta. Over the years we ve gotten pretty good at making French bread and muffuletta buns, but we haven t become known for any other kinds of bread that might be a little more sophisticated. Well, like a lot of other things around here, bread baking is changing too. Bellegarde Bakery bakes a range of bread, made from the stone ground flour that they grind themselves. The owner of Bellegarde Bakery, Graison Gill, is changing our perception of bread in New Orleans, and in area restaurants. Not only does Bellegarde bake a range of fine breads, they re so serious about doing it right that they buit their own flour mill and grind their own flour. Another Lousiana staple is rice. Artemis Antipass is the founder of Greek Girls Rice Pudding. If you ve never had it before, rice pudding is to rice, what bread pudding is to bread. Greek Girls is made according to a traditional Antippas family restaurant from generations back, in Greece, brought to New Orleans by Artemis

We ve been here in New Orleans for 300 years. We wouldn t still be here if we didn t have the ability to adapt. But we don t like change. We still reminisce about long closed drugstores, bakeries, and supermarkets. And, 300 years later, we re still on the brink of flooding when it rains for an hour. The Urban Conservancy is on both sides of this street. They want to keep things as they are, and they want change. They want you to support your local small retailer, and they want you to bust up the concrete in your yard and make a garden to help stop street flooding. Dana Eness is the Executive Director of The Urban Conservancy. Seamus McGuire is an architect whose company, Cicada, is all about new buildings and new technology. They have a fleet of drones that they use for architectural photos, videos, 3D scanning, and mapping. And they do 3D printing. At the same time, Cicada is dedicated to keeping the new New Orleans blending with the old. For both The Urban Conservancy and Cicada, the central question is, Ho

If you re a certain age you might remember the telephone. It was a hard plastic piece of equipment about the size of a small cat. You leased the phone, monthly, from what was known as "The phone company." There was only one. Eventually, we got multiple phone companies. Then mobile phones. Which came to be known as cell phones. Then we got what we called "smart phones" which was a cell phone that did other stuff, like connect to the internet. Today, we re back to calling it simply "the phone." And there is practically nothing in our daily lives that our phone isn t connected to. Shopping. Entertainment. News. Navigation. And instantly answering practically any question we ask it. Now we re starting to see advanced, specialized uses of our phones, in ways you might not have imagined. For example, one of the common complaints you hear from police officers, and other law enforcement agents, is that the paperwork required for getting an arrest warrant which requires a judge s signature can take hours. Meet Cloud G

One positive thing we can say about social media is, it s a great leveler. Even CEO s and celebrities reveal that, although their giant homes and incomes may be far removed from ours, their daily lives and fears are not that different. Nonetheless, even in a world with no secrets, you d probably still be surprised if a celebrity went on Instagram with photos of their kid s head lice. Christina Womack says there is still a social stigma against admitting you re infested with lice. And Christina ought to know she s the owner of Nitpicking in NOLA, a company that will come to your home or school and get rid of nits. On the whole other end of the spectrum of human science, there s Dave Winwood. Dave is a serious over achiever who is visiting Out to Lunch from from Baton Rouge where he s Associate Director of Pennington Biomedical Research Center as well as Assistant Executive Director of LSU s Innovation Park. Pennington Biomedical Research Center has over 450 employees. They work in 43 laboratories, on a 200 acr

It s one thing to come up with an idea for a business and open it in Mid City or Uptown. It s quite another undertaking to launch and run a business in the 9th Ward. Or the Lower 9th ward. That s what Peter Ricchiuti s guests on today s Out to Lunch are doing. Mark Sanders is the owner and CEO of Ninth Ward Nursery. Rashida Ferdinand is Executive Director of Sankofa Community Development Corporation. Mark s nursery is in its third year. That s what is sometimes euphemistically called an "inflection point" the point where business takes off. Or comes crashing down. Rashida has been running Sankofa since 2008 and, with food markets, healthcare, and now a wetlands project, is a major contributor to the continuing transformation and preservation of the Lower 9th Ward. We don t often consider the implication of business in the 9th Ward, but it could be a vital a part of New Orleans future growth. Photos at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

In 1967, Edward de Bono invented "Lateral Thinking." It s a type of reasoning that solves problems by steps that might not be obvious. For example, how do you get more college grads to enter the workforce wanting to go into technology Regular logic would suggest employers pay more to people in these positions. Or offer college scholarships. Todd Wackerman has come up with a lateral thinking solution. It s called STEM Library Lab. It allows high schools to get kids interested in STEM subjects by lending schools science and tech equipment that they couldn t otherwise afford. Flor Serna is working laterally on the problem of only 3 in 10 people in engineering being women, and only 1 in 10 being women of color. Flor is the Executive Director of Electric Girls a non profit learning space where girls learn STEM skills from each other. In a world where everything we hear about seems to be some form of disturbing news that s delivered by mass media that half of us distrust, or social media that most of us distrust, i

For a number of years now we ve talked about New Orleans as a great place to start a business. But we ve learned it s not such an easy place to take a startup to the next level. When the business you re starting up is not technology, but you re actually manufacturing a real world product, it becomes even more difficult. Jaime Glas seems to have defied the odds. Jaime started a manufacturing business. She s based out of New Orleans. And her company is doing great. Jaime s company is called Haute Work. She makes industrial flame resistant clothing for women. If that s one product you would never have thought of inventing, Luke Hooper has a bunch more. Everything from a whole new version of chess, to baked goods, and a new way of keeping your shoes on your feet. Luke has a company called Factor 10 Design, where they take original ideas and turn them into commercial products. Photos over lunch at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

Remember that time you had a great idea You were probably doing something you ve done a thousand times before and you thought, "There s got to be an easier way. Why doesn t somebody invent..." fill in the blank. People who work in universities have these kinds of ideas too. When you think about it, the reason people work at universities is they re smart. They re the kinds of people who deal in ideas. But by and large they re not the kinds of people who know how to turn an idea into a product. That s why universities now have departments that do just that. They re called departments of Technology Transfer. At Tulane the Executive Director of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Development is John Christie. At the LSU Health Sciences Center the Director of Technology Management is Patrick Reed. Peter Ricchiuti has a good idea of his own have lunch with John Christie and Patrick Reed. Photos over lunch in The Wine Room at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

Sometimes the stars just line up. Whether it s fate, destiny, luck, or your own ingenuity, once in a while you find yourself in the right place at the right time and you have one of those "Aha" moments. Turning that aha moment into a successful business is a whole other matter. That s what Peter s two lunch guests today are hard at work doing. Boyce Clark was a geophysicist and a single dad who came up with a chemical solution to tame his daughter s frizzy hair. Now he has a nationwide, chemistry driven beauty products business called Lubricity Labs. Arpit Bhopalkar came to New Orleans and was amazed to find athletes drinking coconut water rather than the sugarcane water he was used to drinking in South East Asia. So Arpit started up Bhoomi Cane Water, a company that makes cane juice from the massive amount of sugar cane grown in Louisiana. Opportunity knocks but once. You get one shot at turning a moment into a mountain of money . Photos over lunch at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

In business, we go to great pains to treat men and women equally. But when it comes to pain itself, men and women are not always equal. That s why Sara Reardon opened NOLA Pelvic Health. NOLA Pelvic Health is the first and only clinic in New Orleans that specializes in the treatment of women s pelvic floor muscle dysfunctions including pelvic pain, bowel and bladder dysfunction, sexual dysfunction, and pregnancy and postpartum recovery. Dr Lana Joseph is the founder of High Level Speech and Hearing. There are two High Level Speech and Hearing clinics in New Orleans one Uptown and one in Elmwood where you can get all kinds of audiology services, from getting your hearing tested, to getting your hearing aid repaired. Generally, when we talk about healthcare we re thinking about one of two scenarios getting treatment for everyday ailments like the flu. Or catastrophic illness, like heart disease or cancer. For these eventualities we expect to be taken care of by health clinics, or hospitals, that are generally p

We get excited when economic development people announce a prestigious business is relocating to New Orleans, and bringing with it hundreds of jobs. But business recruiters often report that quality candidates don t want to move to New Orleans, because of our poor education system and high crime rate. Peter Ricchiuti s guests on this edition of Out to Lunch are working on both of those problems. Jeff Burkhardt s company, Active Solutions, are the guys who are putting crime cameras all over the city. Both the Mayor and Chief of Police believe this is a major step toward reducing crime. Aaron Frumin s company, Uncommon Construction, is linking school and industry, by employing, and paying, high school kids to build new homes, as a part of their education. Everybody agrees, we have to do something about crime and education. Crime cameras are controversial and kids swinging hammers is unorthodox, but maybe they re the kinds of change we need. Photos over lunch at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

People come to Louisiana looking for everything from Alligators to Zydeco. The two things they are usually not looking for are high tech superstars and women duck hunters. That s exactly who Peter s guests on Out to Lunch are looking for. Bill Ellison and his venture capital organization Innovation Catalyst invest in new high tech companies. Some of them turn out to be big deals, like Waitr, which recently sold for 308m. Emily Degan s company, Saint Hugh, makes outdoor apparel, focused on functional and fashionable clothes for women who like to hunt ducks. In business, New Orleans and Louisiana are both undeniably changing. Ideas and companies that would have been completely foreign to us and unfundable a few years ago, are taking root and flourishing. It no longer seems unreasonable or unlikely to wonder if Saint Hugh could become the next Lulu Lemon or if Innovation Catalyst could finance the next Facebook. Photos at Commander s Palace by Jill Lafleur.

You ve probably heard of Maslow s Hierarchy of Needs. At the foundation of the pyramid is our need for shelter and food. Even if you re a real New Orleanian and you think about food a lot, there s a pretty good chance you don t spend too much time pondering the 40 trillion bacteria living in your gut. Dr. Dale Pfost does. Dale s company, Microbiome Therapeutics, has launched a product called BiomeBliss. It s a step up from probiotics. BiomeBliss is prebiotics. On the basic need for shelter, Jonathan Tate and his company, OJT, are an architecture and design company who are taking a novel approach to where you live. They re buying up irregular size lots that nobody wants in desirable New Orleans neighborhoods, and building irregular shaped homes with irregular low price tags. Peter Ricchiuti goes Out to Lunch at Commander s Palace with Dale, Jonathan, and a whole new look at our most fundamental human needs. If you re a regular follower of Out to Lunch and familair with New Orleans, this is another in the serie