It's Baton Rouge: Out To Lunch

The bulk of Louiaisna's population, living in cities like Baton Rouge and New Orleans, probably don’t think much about it, but farming is a significant sector of the state’s economy. Nearly one-third of the state’s land is farmland! There are 27,400 farms in Louisiana, though it’s a rapidly changing and challenging way to make a living. Even given the obstacles though, there is opportunity for a new generation of creative cultivators who are practicing new ways of raising livestock, growing crops, and creating new products with the output. Galen Iverstine is founder and co-owner of Iverstine Farms and Butcher. The name of the company refers to a farm in Kentwood, Louisiana that uses sustainable farming practices in raising its cattle, and a full-service butcher shop, smokehouse and "eatery" in Baton Rouge. At the Baton Rouge outlet Galen sells local, farm-raised meats, and supports local farming partners who prioritize land-healing methods. Galen started the business in 2010, when he purchased his 65 acre far

We live at an interesting nexus today, where so much of our economy is focused on building processes and systems that enable us to exist in the virtual world while at the same time we continue to build and develop the physical world in which we also exist. Maybe one day, one of those worlds will overtake the other. For now though, we seem to have one foot in each world and pass between them multiple times every day. Navigating our journeys through both of these worlds creates unlimited opportunities for creative entrepreneurs. Dustin Puryear os founder and CEO of Giant Rocketship, a Baton Rouge based tech company that has developed an AI-powered project manager that efficiently assigns and monitors tasks for IT companies, and can reassign them if a team member faces challenges or is unavailable. Dustin founded Giant Rocketship as an outgrowth of Puryear IT, which provides a range of IT services for small and medium-sized business. Dustin still owns both companies, but spends most of his time these days focuse

As our economy and society have become more complex, we’ve started to rely on big data, data driven solutions and AI analytics to describe what we do, what we buy, and where we choose to invest. Where does all this data and information come from? And how can these analytics really help us and our businesses do better? Rachel Verron is founder and CEO of Ruby Research, a Baton Rouge based company that offers data, research and analytics services to nonprofit and government clients. Ruby Research helps clients use data to learn, improve and grow. Rachel is a mixed method policy researcher with a personal specialty in human services, child and family policy and a passion for the nonprofit space. Before founding the firm in mid-2021, she was director of business intelligence and analytics at the LSU Foundation. Prior to that she was an analyst Louisiana Economic Development. Rachel says Ruby Research represents a coming home to what she feels is her true vocation: putting the best of her knowledge and energy to w

As we’ve all heard, America is aging and the numbers are pretty startling. People 65 and older represented just 16% of the population in 2019. By 2040, they’ll make up nearly one fourth of all Americans, and those numbers are expected to continue to climb. Part of the reason people are living longer is because of new technologies and innovations in the healthcare sector that are enabling providers to deliver more effective care in new and more efficient ways. It’s a space full of challenges and opportunities - and local Baton Rouge entrepreneurs are on the front lines. Rachael Slaughter is President and co-owner of Orion Labotatories, a medical testing lab based in Baton Rouge that in just a few short years has become the largest independent lab in the state, processing some 600,000 patient samples a year. Rachael co-founded the company with her husband David Slaughter in 2017. Today, they’re taking on industry giants like Quest and Lab Corps, with an in-house test menu, a dedicated team for specimen collecti

It’s no secret that Baton Rouge and the surrounding parishes are home to some of the largest petrochemical plants in the world. We’re also a hub of activity when it comes to climate and resilience because of our sinking coastline and rising seas in an era of climate change. The intersection of these vast and important fields create some interesting opportunities for companies that also are based here and training young people to work in those companies in the future.  Mark Fallon is CEO of APTIM, a Baton Rouge-based company that provides engineering, program management, environmental services, disaster recovery, complex facility maintenance, and construction services to clients in in the energy sector, as well as governments and the military. APTIM was spun off several years ago from CB&I, which, many in Baton Rouge may remember, bought The Shaw Group in 2013. Mark has been at the helm of the company since April 2020, which was, no doubt, an interesting time to start a new big challenge. But he came armed

Louisiana continues to rank behind almost every other state in the country in terms of its educational outcomes across the board – from Pre-K through post secondary. But buried under those bad stats, are some bright spots – success stories of programs and schools that are finding ways to prepare students and train them for the jobs of the future. On this episode of Out to Lunch, meet two of the leading lights of the Baton Rouge education system. Tina Holland is President and CEO of Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, better known as Fran U. Tina came to Fran U in 2014 from Notre Dame, Indiana, where she had served as Executive Vice President and Provost of Holy Cross College. In the years since, she has overseen an aggressive and successful expansion of Fran U. Tina Holland, whose combination of military and education experience and vision has elevated Fran U to an accredited college Fran U started out nearly a century ago as Our Lady of the Lake, a nursing school. Today it is a ful

It can be threatening if not downright scary sometimes to consider the extent to which apps and Artificial Intelligence now run our lives. But it’s also exciting to think about all the ways that this technology can be used to cure diseases or build sophisticated satellite systems or even do simple things - like helping us do the laundry! Or training a new employee on how to do their job. AI Laundry Chris Hilliard is co-founder of Suds Laundry Service, a traditional laundry service with a distinctly 21st century twist: Suds has created a custom app that customers can use to schedule laundry pickup and delivery from their home, dorm or office along with any special instructions. Suds will launder or dry clean the clothes and return them within 24 hours. Chris and his partners created the company in 2019, while they were still college students at Southern University in Baton Rouge,  looking for a solution to the piles of laundry building up in their dorm rooms. In the years since, they have graduated and grown t

Real estate is something that touches all of us. Even if we don’t own our own home, we have to rent which means the economic forces that impact buyers, sellers and investors impact all of us. COVID was a major disrupter of all segments of the real estate market. And the post-COVID era is no less unprecedented. Which makes every day at the office an interesting one for those who work in the real estate business. Dave Lakvold is a commercial real estate appraiser and owner of The Lakvold Group, which has been appraising apartment complexes, office buildings, warehouses and retail centers in the Baton Rouge area since Dave started the company in 1995. That was around the same time he married his wife, Angie Lakvold, also an appraiser who, at the time, was working for First Commerce Corp, a bank holding company. Four years later, Angie left the bank and joined Dave at the Lakvold Group.  They’ve been working together ever since. Dave focuses on commercial bank and litigation appraisals, and Angie specializes in i

We focus a lot in our society today on those who make their living in front of the camera, whether acting or influencing or prognosticating on important things. But those who shoot those images and videos have equally interesting stories to tell,  and businesses they have built doing it. They also have a unique perspective that comes from looking into that two-dimension view-finder that informs their work, and in some instances inspires them to do bigger things with far-reaching impact. John Jackson is co-founder of Launch Media, a full service multimedia production company that offers video production and creative services from brand development to scripting, casting, post production and corporate communications. The company's suite of services has evolved from their origins back in 2005, when it was called Green Screen TV and focused on making short videos. Over the years, as the company has grown, John has become active in historic preservation the redevelopment of downtown Baton Rouge. In 2014, he bought

While the men and women who serve in the military make untold sacrifices to serve their country, when they come home they face a unique set of challenges – especially when it comes tt starting a business. According to the most recent statistics, in the United States today, fewer than six percent of all businesses are owned by military veterans. And of those roughly 338-thousand veteran-owned businesses, only 10% are owned by Black veterans.  A handful of them are in Baton Rouge.  Craig Stevens is President of Genesis 360, a Baton Rouge based company that acts like a one-stop shop providing services related to building maintenance, grounds maintenance and construction and even IT services. Craig started the company in 2011 as a parking lot-striping company so its scope of services was limited but quickly grew as Craig began offering more and more services to a clientele that now span the country and include commercial business and the federal government. Craig, a native of Opelousas, who now lives in Baton Rou

One of our favorite Out to Lunch shows, for many reasons, was a 2019 episode  called High on Mushrooms that brought together two interesting, unlikely guests, whose worlds could not have been more different. Paul Charbonnet, a drone pilot and the owner of Atmosphere Drones, which shoots all sort of aerial scenes for movies, TV and a variety of users; and Cyrus Lester, co-owner of Mushroom Maggies Farm, a Saint Francisville based farmer of specialty and exotic mushrooms that Cyrus and his wife Maggie sell to local restaurants, farmers markets and specialty distributors. Though Paul and Cyrus were strangers to each other when they met on the show, several months later, quite by chance, they became next door neighbors! And from there they've become real friends. In the few years since a lot has changed. Both have weathered the pandemic. Cyrus has had a second child. Paul has started a second company called Compass Visuals, which specializes in robots that work with their cameras to hyper real videos for commerci

If you’ve ever dreamed about writing or dabbled in writing then you’ve probably engaged in that fantasy where Terry Gross or Oprah is interviewing you about your brilliant new best seller or memoir or thriller or screen play. For most of us that's just a day dream. But a rare handful of local writers are actually authors of books with titles published by legitimate publishers. How does this happen? Is there a secret to getting someone to read your manuscript? If a publisher picks it up, does it change your life? Two local authors tell all Michael Rubin is a full-time attorney specializing in appellate law with the high powered McGlinchey firm here in Baton Rouge. He's also a successful author of legal thrillers that, like John Grisham’s gripping novels, center on things Mike knows well—the Deep South, racism, family legacies and where the law intersects with the criminal justice system. Mike is the co-author of The Cottoncrest Curse, Cashed Out and A White Hot Plan along with his wife, Ayan. The books are pub

We’re inundated with bad news and dire predictions about the sate of our nation and our world and, here in south Louisiana, the condition of environment, which is ever more vulnerable to climate change and global warming. Our unhealthy lifestyles are also a problem: we spend too much time in front of screens - now under the control of artificial intelligence - and we eat the wrong foods full of processed ingredients and high fructose corn syrup. But, there are signs of hope everywhere that it’s not too late! And forward thinking entrepreneurs are creating businesses specifically designed to address the challenges with the way we build and live and eat. Caitlin Robbins is co-founder and co-owner of Swamp Fly, an environmental design and consulting firm that specializes in strategic planting design, wildlife gardens, reforestation, green infrastructure and land management for both residential and commercial clients. Swamp Fly is proudly woman-owned and Caitlin and her partners are committed to protecting Louisi

DIY. We all know what that means. Do It Yourself. It’s usually applied to home improvement projects. Like, “Why pay a professional to tile your bathroom when you can DIY.” Well, whether or not you can tile your bathroom as well as a tile layer is debatable, but there’s one thing that a number of people, at some point decide they just have to DIY - and that’s life. Especially work life. You can stay in your job, doing what you do, and be perfectly happy. But if you’re not happy with the way things are, if you feel unfulfilled, and you wish you could change your current situation, well, you can make the leap and DIY. Ronnie Anderson has a great job. He’s the Laboratory Technical Supervisor of Baton Rouge General, at the Ascension and Bluebonnet locations. But when his daughter asked him why there were no princesses who looked like her in the fairy tales he was reading to her, and Ronnie couldn’t find any anywhere, he picked up his pen and started writing. To date Ronnie’s written six books of fairy tales, unite

Most of us spend our days at work, whether that’s at the office or in this new post-covid world, in some sort of hybrid, virtual, workspace. But whatever it is you're doing, it’s probably pretty serious and grownup. But, imagine if you spent your work day doing something totally fun and goofy! The kind of thing most people do at parties or on vacation. Stephanie Morace is owner of Balloonatics of Baton Rouge, a local business that specializes in balloon arts and entertaining. That includes everything from the balloon animals and sculptures you see at carnivals and kids’ birthdays to high-end decorative walls for corporate events and galas. Beyond her day-today balloon world, Stephanie travels the country demonstrating her techniques at trade shows and competitions. It’s not at all what she envisioned she would be doing back in 2013, when she left her job as an environmental engineer to hang out her shingle as a balloon artist and entertainer. In the years since Balloonatics has grown beyond Baton Rouge to New

If you’re like a lot of people, you may never have completely gotten your head around crypto currency or believed that it is a viable and inevitable replacement for traditional bullion-based U.S. dollars. When the crypto market cratered in the summer of 2022, you might have felt a little bit vindicated and assumed that the whole thing was over. A flash in the pan, just like you’ve been saying all along. Right? Well, not so fast apparently. As crypto continues its fluctuations, here in Baton Rouge there are more than a few entrepreneurs betting on the continued adoption and growth of alternative currencies. Among them are Stephanie Riegel's guests on this edition of Out to Lunch Baton Rouge. Jared Loftus was the poster child for entrepreneurism in Baton Rouge a decade ago. He had owned a popular T-shirt company near the LSU campus, then brought the food truck revolution to the capital region with Taco de Paco. He also took on the beleaguered bus system, CATS, at a pivotal moment and got himself appointed to it

There are so many things we take for granted we don’t even much think about them: they’re part of our daily life so we may not even really pay them much attention. For example, a billboard we pass on the side of the road, or the bar of soap we pick up to wash our hands. What separates creative entrepreneurs from the rest of us is the ability to take those everyday things and come up with a way to reimagine them and make them better so they can reach more people. They're generally the kind of innovations that engender a "Wow, now you come to mention it" response in the rest of us. David Rollins is co-Founder and Director of Sales at Aura Ad Company, a south Louisiana ad agency that has a unique niche in the out-of-home advertising, or what we used to call outdoor advertising, space. Aura specializes in cartop digital billboards. That’s right, Aura puts digital signage on top of ride-sharing vehicles or taxis, then pairs the technology in its signs with the GPS technology that most people unwittingly enable on

Since the beginning of time, we have turned to nature to find plants and roots and fungi to calm us or pep us up, help us perform better, or take us out of our bodies and minds to some other dimension. It’s an age old tradition that continues to the present day and has given us foods, beverages, remedies, supplements and, drugs around which entire industries have been built. Randy Mire makes his living in one of those industries: medical marijuana. Randy is a pharmacist and owner of Capitol Wellness Solutions.  We had Randy on this show back in 2018, when the state’s medical marijuana industry was just getting started and Randy was the sole licensed pharmacist in the state to dispense medical marijuana. Today, Capitol Wellness Solutions is one of 9 licensed pharmacies around the state that is selling medical marijuana, and state lawmakers in 2022 passed several measures to grow the size of the industry by allowing more licenses and more types of legal marijuana. Randy had been a licensed pharmacist in Baton R

Baton Rouge may be no Silicon Valley, heck it may not not even be the "Silicon Bayou" that we were hyped in the early 2000s by the tech park and economic development folks. That said, there are nonetheless some amazingly impressive companies here that are creating tech products and performing IT services in ways that are not being done anywhere else. These are not attention-grabbing cool startups with a catchy marketing hook solving some or other issue like laundry and parking (though we have those too). They're companies dealing in real-world commodities – businesses that have grown from the ground up and proven themselves so successful that they've been acquired by larger companies or private equity firms. Mo Vij is founder and owner of 365 Labs, a tech company that builds software and processes for public safety departments, courts, prosecutors, and first responders. Mo founded the company in January of 2021, using his @Highland campus as its headquarters. The company is funded by Vij Capital, a private eq

The lemonade stand has become a sort of iconic institution in the American narrative: the kid on the side of the road peddling lemonade from a pitcher. A way to make a little extra change and stave of summer boredom while also picking up a thing or two about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. But the lemonade stand can be so much more. Not only a teaching tool but a way to help young people with disabilities learn entrepreneurship. Case in point: Sherilyn Hayward's business, Leroy's Lip Smack'n Lemonade. Sherilyn is co-owner of this local Baton Rouge lemonade biz, Leroy’s Lip Smack’n Lemonade, an enterprise she and her husband Dan started with their son Leroy in 2012, when Leroy was just 6 years old and participating in Lemonade Day Louisiana, a nationwide annual event that teaches children how to be entrepreneurs. From that simple beginning the one-day lemonade stand expanded to festivals and pop-up locations, eventually growing into a full blown business. Today, Leroy’s Lip Smack Lemonade is sold in 40 g